First published in the Chicago Free Press on January 4, 2006.
The Vatican's new Instruction barring gay men from training for the priesthood is a farrago of unjustified assumptions, begged questions, circular reasoning, illogical arguments, stolen concepts and confused metaphors with no basis in either Catholic doctrine or current psychology.
The nerve of the new Instruction in paragraph 4 reads:
The candidate to the ordained ministry, therefore, must reach affective maturity. Such maturity will allow him to relate correctly to both men and women...
"Affective maturity" is not defined but since "affective" refers to feelings or emotions the term refers to emotional maturity.
Then paragraphs 8 and 9 state that:
those who ... present deep-seated homosexual tendencies ... find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women.
So although the Instruction evades saying so explicitly, gay men are barred from priesthood training because they are thought to have immature sexual feelings.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, in Catholic tradition or doctrine supports the idea that homosexual desire constitutes any sort of immaturity. Catholic doctrine and tradition had always held that homosexual behavior was sinful but it never argued that that sin was the result of a psychosexual immaturity.
So where does this idea come from? The answer is: Freud.
Starting with an apriori assumption of a natural "procreative instinct," Freud developed a fanciful, Rube Goldberg-like theory of psychosexual development in which a male infant passes through narcissistic oral, anal and phallic stages, reaches an Oedipal desire to have sex with his mother, then fearing castration by his jealous father transfers his love to another woman, thus progressing to a glorious heterosexuality.
Men are homosexual, Freud thought, when this progression is inhibited-Freud never explains how-and the child is fixated at some preliminary stage of development: blocked at a narcissistic stage, or fails to negotiate the Oedipal phase, or fears castration by a woman's vagina, etc.
However bizarre all this seems, the result was that homosexuals were viewed as psychosexually immature. In his 1933 New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud wrote that homosexuals "have failed to accomplish some part of normal sexual development." And in his 1935 Letter to an American Mother Freud wrote, "We consider (homosexuality) to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development."
Commentaries on the Instructions distributed by the Catholic news agency Zenit spell out the rationale in even more obviously Freudian terms.
If the Catholic Church now adopts Freud's early 20th-century view that homosexual desire constitutes psychosexual immaturity, then what argument could it have offered before 1900 for barring gay men from the priesthood? The answer is: none whatsoever. So either forbidding (celibate) gay men to enter seminaries is a novel doctrine or else the church has always officially forbidden (celibate) gay men but never had any rationale for it.
Worse yet for the church, Freudian ideology, particularly with regard to sex, is now entirely discredited, added to the junk heap of pseudo-science along with astrology, phrenology, N-rays, phlogiston, etc. Few psychiatrists and psychoanalysts now take it seriously. And no other theory supports the idea that gays are psychosexually immature. So the church is left without an intellectually respectable basis for the view it has just adopted.
And there are further problems with the Instruction. It claims that gay men cannot "relate correctly to both men and women" and that only heterosexual men can develop "a true sense of spiritual fatherhood toward the Church community."
But where has church teaching ever spelled out why or how priests are supposed to relate to men and women differently? So if a priest with an erotic inclination toward women is able to relate equally to men and women-say, with loving, pastoral concern-despite his erotic desire for one rather than the other, it follows logically that a priest with an erotic inclination toward men should be able to do the same. So the church's argument fails.
And since the requisite "fatherhood" is spiritual, not sexual, there is no reason why gay men cannot fulfill that role. One has only to look around to find numerous gay men successfully performing the non-sexual child-rearing and mentoring tasks of actual fatherhood for their adoptive or foster children. So the church is left without a valid argument for its demand.
The Instruction notes the requirement that a priest "should seek to reflect in himself, as far as possible, the human perfection which shines forth in the incarnate Son of God." But this would exclude gay men only if Jesus' perfection included heterosexuality. But there is not a word of biblical evidence that Jesus had any specific sexual orientation. So the church's argument fails.
Finally, paragraph 11 states explicitly that:
in responding to the call of God, the man (candidate priest) offers himself freely to him in love.
It is hardly frivolous to observe that so long as the Catholic Church conceives of its god as male, a gay man will be more readily able than a heterosexual man to make this affective offering with wholehearted, unconflicted commitment.