(Continued
from page 3)
a time of crisis of confidence among the faithful regarding church goverance
and hierarchical leadership as allegations of priests’ sexual abuse of
minors—and of a decades-long cover-up on the part of the church—spread
across the country. Some conservative Catholics and church official have
blamed "militant homosexuals" among the clergy for this scandal, branding
them "a true plague on the priesthood." In The Wall Street Journal on March
26, for example, a religious studies professor from Penn State, Philip
Jenkins, wrote about the American Catholic church’s infiltration by
"activist, feminist, and gay groups" in the past 40 years. But this current
crisis is not, in fact, rooted in the gay clergy.
Let me
offer my own perspective—one based on more than 25 years of faith and life
as a Roman Catholic convert—a perspective I suspect is not so different from
that of many other Catholics, gay and straight alike. First, I have never
encountered any Catholic church culture characterized by, as one Boston
Herald columnist put it, "priestly homosexuals run amok with no fear of
condemnation, secure in the knowledge that no one dares criticize the love
that once dared not speak its name."
The reality
is significantly more boring.
My nearly
ten years of experience in four Catholic academic institutions—my home town
Catholic high school, two American Catholic universities, and now the Weston
Jesuit School of Theology—bear witness to some of the very best pastoral
care that American-style Roman Catholicism has to offer, including pastoral
care to me as a gay man.
Sister Mary
Eudes, for example—my colleague on my hometown Bishop McCort High School
faculty in Johnstown, Pa.—poured tea and served up cheerful, prayerful Irish
wisdom and spirituality as we commiserated, prayed, and rebounded together
from conflicts with a difficult high-school principal. At the University of
Notre Dame, several priests encouraged my undergraduate life, academic as
well as spiritual. One of them was Father Charlie Sheedy, a holy cross
priest who was more aware than I was of my wrestling to reconcile the
rambunctious male sexuality of my emerging gay identity with my newly found
faith. His pastoral counsel was compassionate and affirming.
The same
experience of pastoral support was true at Georgetown University during my
graduate work in business school, when I began to come out of the closet to
a small circle of friends and faculty, most of whom were supportive both of
me and of my emerging academic interest in gay rights in business and
politics.
Still, it
was not until I arrived in Cambridge, Mass., nearly 15 years ago, that my
spiritual desolation over the conflict between my sexual identity and my
religious conviction found true consolation. The catalyst for that
life-saving personal transformation began when a bright and theologically
astute Jesuit priest and pastoral counselor became my spiritual director.
He
listened. He listened. And he listened. Over time, I broke the silence of my
anguished pilgrim’s journey and my struggle with homosexuality. He
understood that I carried with me the heavy baggage of church teaching,
those deeply wounding, soul-shaming words from the church’s
Catechism—"objective disorder," "intrinsic evil"—that pathologize
homosexuality and its loving sexual expression. |
Through the
respectful, nonjudgmental listening
and guidance of spiritual direction and
through
richer encounters of God’s grace in the
sacraments, therapy, and
prayer, I came to
experience the unconditional love of God. I now
feel, to
the core of my being, that God loves me—
embraces me, if you will—along with
all my
quirky postmodern, American but very human
strengths and
vulnerabilities.
I have
reflected at length upon these years of
journey in the Catholic Church. Some
of the
priests were Jesuits. Others belong to the
Congregation of the Holy
Cross. In my
hometown parish of St. Andrews, as my family
faced the reality
of their only son’s gayness,
supportive priests were diocesan: one an
old-
fashioned Irish-American monsignor, the other
a down-to-earth
intellectual and liberal German-
American. Their pastoral message to my
family
was the same—that of Christ’s unconditional
love.
During my
late 20s and early 30s, chapters of
Dignity/USA in San Francisco,
Washington,
D.C., and Boston provided a safe haven. Lay
ministers and
priests in Dignity/San Francisco,
for example, cared for me during a
particularly
hard time, the break up of a same-sex
relationship, with all
the associated pain of a
tender young and broken heart. Dignity/USA is
the
oldest gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgendered American Catholic
organization,
still serving thousands of gay American Catholics
even though
it has been barred from church
property for more than 15 years here in
Boston
and nationwide.
Deep
gratitude is my response for all the
religious men and women, lay ministers
and
priests, counselors and spiritual directors—gay
and straight alike—whose
professional pastoral
care and witness of personal integrity have
supported
and continue to support me and
countless others. Any number of these
ministers
for the Church, many of them straight, threw me
critical lifelines
at pivotal moments in my spiritual
life.
I have not
found these nuns, brothers, and
priests to be "angry," as some suggest.
Rather,
they are compassionate, bridging between the
gifts of the Catholic
tradition they love and the
needs of the particular human heart. I have not
found gay priests a plague on the priesthood.
Rather, they have been miracle
workers, bridging
between the challenge of God’s call to authentic
discipleship and God’s creation of me as a gay
man.
Our Church
needs to learn compassionate
listening. It needs to let go of its refusal to
hear—
that silencing that is, in fact, the very root of our
current crisis.
For the church to listen, we must
share our experiences: my experience of
God’s
spirit at work in me and others’ experience of the
action of God in
their lives—and our stories need
to be taken seriously. Church leaders need
to
hear about the experience of people of Catholic
faith over the full range
of issues now touching
the life of the Church, including issues of
sexuality
and gender, and they need to learn.
Then, God’s
good grace may well have a
chance to work its miraculous redemption—not
just
in each human heart, but also in the Church.
Chuck
Colbert, “In defense of gay priests.”
29 March 2002: Online. Available:
http://www.advocate.com/html/stories/860
/860_colbert.asp |
