ARTICLES

Embrace Ambiguity

Bay Area Seminaries Will Continue to Accept Homosexuals

By George Neumayr

The vast majority of sexual abuse cases in the Church involve homosexual priests preying upon teenage boys. Commenting on this fact earlier this year, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, Pope John Paul II's spokesman, reiterated the importance of the Church's traditional ban on homosexual seminarians. "People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained," he said. But Bay Area seminary leaders do not intend to return to this traditional Catholic practice. They see no fundamental incompatibility between the priesthood and homosexuality.

"That argument was used 50 years ago against bringing blacks into the priesthood," the Reverend Joseph Daoust, president of the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, said to the San Francisco Chronicle in May. "Any mature, well-developed person should be welcome, no matter how God made them."

Daoust worries, not about homosexual seminarians, but about "reactionary candidates." He said to the Chronicle: "We have people of homosexual orientation, but there is no homosexual culture here. If there's a heterosexual subculture, or any subculture, that's a problem. Some of our rigid reactionary candidates would like to form a subculture of ultra-rigid Catholicism where they are only the true believers." Daoust encourages homosexual seminarians to "discuss" their "sexual orientation," otherwise "they tend to repress things," he said to the Chronicle. "If people are afraid to talk, there will be more problems." Not that Daoust wants to discuss everything openly. He may, for example, not want to discuss a recent memo (which this writer saw) that national Jesuit leaders sent to the Jesuit School of the Theology in Berkeley and other Jesuit seminaries in the wake of its homosexual scandals.

The memo sounds satirical, but it isn't. It reads: "Because of some imprudence by Jesuits in the past with regard to bars and the possible harm to the reputation of this community, the Society and the Church, the Jesuit Conference Committee on Formation is asking this of the community: Please avoid bars that are notorious for one reason or another, bars that are used for cruising and pick ups."

The memo continues: "If you do go to a bar ask yourself these questions: Why am I here? What am I looking for? How am I here? Do I have a designated driver, if necessary? Think of the reputation of your community, of the Society and the Church."

I phoned Daoust and the Jesuit provincial, Father Thomas Smolich, unsuccessfully for a response.

The Reverend Gerald Coleman, president of St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Seminary in Menlo Park, agrees with Daoust that homosexuals should continue to receive ordination in the Church. He said to the San Francisco Chronicle that a Vatican ban on homosexual seminarians would be counterproductive, because "one effect of that kind of blanket statement would be that a guy who was gay could just lie. My fear is that he won't deal well with that area in his life."

But Coleman does object to homosexuals as priests if they make too much noise about their homosexuality. "If people are identifiably gay in the way they walk and talk, do you want that element in the priesthood? No. Guys should not let their sexuality get in the way of their priesthood," Coleman said to the Chronicle. "I don't like guys to announce they're gay. Then they're known as 'a gay priest.' A priest is a priest."

The traditional custom of the Church, however, is to oppose the ordination of all homosexuals, whether they are circumspect or loud about their inclinations to grave sin. The Church has traditionally considered a homosexual an inappropriate symbol of Jesus Christ and an undue risk to the reputation and holiness of the priesthood. Under Pope John XXIII, the Holy See declared to bishops that "those affected by the perverse inclination to homosexuality or pederasty should be excluded from religious vows and ordination."

Canon law, interpreted in the light of Catholic custom, also prohibits seminarians with the psychological problem of homosexuality. "The diocesan Bishop is to admit to the major seminary only those whose human, moral, spiritual and intellectual gifts, as well as physical and psychological health and right intention, show that they are capable of dedicating themselves permanently to the sacred ministries," it reads.

In a recent report to the American bishops, the theologian Germain Grisez writes: "Can men with a homosexual orientation become good candidates for ordination? There are reasons to doubt it. Sexuality profoundly shapes the lives of human persons, and a homosexual orientation, albeit less bizarre than the commonly recognized paraphilias, is a grave disorder. Homosexual men no doubt can be perfectly continent, but the charism of celibacy involves more: peaceful chastity and the sublimation of sexual energy into priestly service for the kingdom's sake."

Philadephia Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua is one of the few bishops to accept the traditional ban on homosexual seminarians. At St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia, homosexual candidates, even ones who say they are celibate, are never considered. Bevilacqua explains his policy on the grounds that homosexuals can't make the sacrifice that is proper to the priesthood, namely, to give up the "moral good" of family and children for the good of the Church. Homosexuals can only give up a "moral evil" -- homosexual acts.

"We feel that a person who is homosexually oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood, even if he did not commit an act [of gay sex]. There is a difference between heterosexual candidates and homosexual candidates. A heterosexual is taking on a good thing, becoming a priest, and giving up a very good thing, the desire to have a family. [A gay seminarian], by his orientation, is not giving up family and marriage. He is giving up what the church considers an abomination," said Bevilacqua in April.

In an interview with this writer, Michael Rose, author of Goodbye, Good Men, argues that simple common sense should exclude homosexuals from seminary life, since it so obviously places them in the "near occasion" of sin. The Church is asking for trouble by placing homosexuals in an all-male setting, he says. "We have seen what that leads to."

Would it be prudent, he asks, to put "heterosexuals in a seminary with college-age girls for five to six years?" Of course not. Similarly, he says it "would not be a healthy situation" to place homosexuals in close quarters with men for that length of time. "The guys who define themselves as homosexuals have a problem to begin with," he says. "Homosexuality should be a disqualifying mark, because same-sex attraction is an intrinsic disorder."

Rose believes seminary directors like Daoust and Coleman have accepted too much "gay propaganda." In the last few decades, he points out, seminaries have promoted homosexuals at the expense of heterosexuals, creating a climate too demoralizing and off-putting to attract good candidates. "Homosexuality should be used as a mark against seminarians, not as mark for them as it has been," he says.

Charles Wilson, head of the St. Joseph's Foundation, a canon law organization in Texas, told me that he would like to see the Church make the ban on homosexual seminarians more explicit in canon law. He agrees that if canon law is interpreted according to Catholic custom, it prohibits homosexual seminarians.

Bishops, such as Bevilacqua and Fabian Bruskowitz, are "perfectly free to interpret canon law as saying no to homosexuals," Wilson says. And no homosexual could bring a canonical case against them, because the priesthood "is not a right, and so they would not have recourse. Custom does have the force of law," Wilson says. "The bishops who are ordaining homosexuals are acting contrary to custom, which itself is a law."

But Wilson says that canon law is general on this point, because the Church assumed it didn't need to bother banning a practice so devoid of common sense. Just as canon law doesn't speak specifically to the issue of homosexual seminarians, so it doesn't prohibit specifically a priest from, say, smoking a cigarette while performing the consecration, Wilson says. It is silent on these matters, because it assumed "no bishop in his right mind" would permit such things, says Wilson.

Many high-ranking Church officials now admit the extent of the homosexual problem in the priesthood. Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, has worried aloud that seminaries have been creating a "homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexual young men think twice" about entering them. He admitted that it is a "struggle" to prevent the priesthood from becoming a haven for homosexuals.

Monsignor Eugene Clark, in a homily delivered from the pulpit of St. Patrick's in the absence of Edward Cardinal Egan, called homosexuality a "disorder" and described the ordination of homosexuals as a "grave mistake." "In some seminaries in the United States, known homosexual young men have been accepted as candidates against every rule of Church wisdom and Church requirements," he said. Such seminaries have become "a breeding ground for later homosexual practice after ordination" and do not take seriously enough "the manifest danger of man-boy relationships." "Homosexuality became in the American exchange of views a protected area," said Clark, "and unfortunately. homosexual students were allowed to pass through seminaries."

Coleman objects to the "recent statements of the Cardinals linking homosexuality to pedophilia," reports Time magazine (May 20). (Efforts to reach Coleman for this article were unsuccessful.) "I think they've confused the issues immeasurably," he says.

According to Time magazine, Coleman's students "are expected to discuss their sexual attitudes and development, among other things, once a month with their advisers and must take three courses on sexuality: a class on overall human sexuality, another on intimacy and celibacy, and one on sexual abuse, which includes guest lectures by victims and perpetrators."

A Time reporter sat in on one of these courses and wasn't entirely impressed. "At a recent meeting of Coleman's elective class, Homosexuality and the Church, words and phrases like penis, Freud, male rectum and Will and Grace are bandied about without embarrassment," reports Time. "Coleman covers the scriptural teachings on homosexuality and the psychological impact of homophobia. At one point he says that gay teenagers suffer from a lack of role models. In the next moment, he says gay priests and teachers should not come out of the closet, lest they confuse children. It is an awkward balancing act, and a seminarian calls Coleman on the contradiction. 'How are young people supposed to work out their sexuality if they don't have role models?' asks Chris Sellars, 27, who is scheduled to be ordained next January. Coleman listens intently but stands by his imperfect position. 'Our fundamental role is to proclaim the Gospel,' he says. The other seven students around the table look slightly confused, but Coleman encourages them to accept ambiguity and just be aware of different perspectives.'"

Ambiguity is Coleman's specialty. In a column for the San Jose Valley Catholic in 2000, Coleman, addressing the issue of California's Proposition 22, wrote that he can "see no moral reason why civil law could not in some fashion recognize these faithful and loving [homosexual] unions by according them certain rights and obligations, thus assisting [homosexual] persons in these unions with clear and specified benefits." This statement, he told confused lay Catholics, implied no disagreement with Church teaching. Bay Area Catholics, tired of such semantical games, can see the costs of "ambiguity" all too clearly in the morning's headlines.

Why, lay Catholics wonder, can't Coleman understand those costs himself? To understand them, he would need to look no further than his own seminary. His former academic dean, Father Carl Schipper, left St. Patrick's seminary in 2000 after an alleged internet solicitation of a 13-year-old boy.

Attempts to reach a spokesman for the archdiocese of San Francisco regarding this article were unsuccessful.

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