First published in a slightly different form in the Chicago Free Press on September 28, 2005.
The Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education is reportedly readying a directive that homosexuals should be barred from entering or continuing in seminary preparation for the priesthood.
In addition, the Congregation is beginning a multi-year "apostolic visitation" to all 200-plus U.S. Catholic seminaries to examine their adherence to church doctrine and "look for signs of homosexuality." (Insert your own jokes here about "signs of homosexuality.")
Since gay men, open or closeted, are reportedly a sizable minority in seminary training, if these efforts are undertaken seriously, they will no doubt cause a decrease in the number of men entering the priesthood, exacerbating the current shortage of priests and further weakening the church's institutional base. Since the Catholic hierarchy is one of the leading forces opposing gay equality, this result should be welcomed.
But the policy also highlights several anomalies and contradictions in current Catholic thinking.
The new instructions reportedly claim that gay men have a "serious personality disorder." But that claim is simply false. That view was abandoned by institutional psychology in the 1970s after psychologists determined that gays and lesbian had healthy personalities and normal psychological functioning.
Catholic use of outdated psychological language to stigmatize gay men is not surprising since the psychological claim was itself a secularized version of Christian moral doctrine, reformulated in the late 19th and early 20th century into pseudo-scientific psychological language. So it is to be expected that the Catholic hierarchy would continue to find the claim plausible when no one else does.
Of course, the Catholic church has long held the view that a homosexual orientation is "objectively disordered" and it has now decided that it does not want "disordered" men, celibate or otherwise, as priests. Catholic doctrine holds that "rightly ordered" people sexually desire only the other sex.
It says this because it believes that its God created the penis only for procreation-at least when used sexually. This, of course, is nothing more than our old friend "Intelligent Design" formulated centuries ago by theologians ignorant of evolutionary biology. But even they should have realized that according to Genesis 2, Eve was decidedly an afterthought by their God, so the God could not possibly have "intelligently designed" Adam's penis for procreation.
Apologists for the new policies try to put a benevolent spin on them, arguing that admitting gay men into an all-male seminary places undue temptation in their way. Yet it should go without saying, but apparently does not, that there is no evidence that gay men are less able than heterosexuals to control their sexual behavior, nor does the church pretend to offer any.
To the contrary, according to Richard Sipe's exhaustive 1990 study A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy, the preponderant sexual behavior by priests is-heterosexual.
Indeed, the Catholic demand for priestly celibacy was primarily motivated by a desire to assure that priests did not have children who could lawfully inherit church property. Thus the Lateran Council of 1139 declared the marriages of clerics not only illegal but invalid. But the very need for such a dictate indicates that some priests were marrying. From this standpoint, gay men would seem to be ideal priests since they would not generate potential heirs.
Since none of the stated reasons for the new policy seem cogent, it must be primarily a public relations move, enabling the church to say that it has done everything in its power to eliminate the problem. Rather than blaming seminaries for poor training in how to manage celibacy and their failure to weed out troubled and weak-willed candidates, the church is pretending that eliminating gays from the priesthood, at least those they can find, is the solution.
Still, you have to wonder why any gay man would want to become a priest when his church so clearly says he is defective and disordered and it does not want him. No doubt it is an easy enough job. It pleases many Catholic families. It guarantees a degree of respect. It provides a ready-made career path for the directionless. It promises a structure for those who need one.
But if the motive is benevolent, the desire to do good or even serve a god, there are other, frankly more effective ways to help people: Becoming a teacher, a nurse, a musician who creates beauty, an entrepreneur who creates jobs, the inventor of a useful product, a designer who enriches our visual life. All of these benefit people more than saying mass every day.
Ultimately, gay men who become priests seem like "enablers" of Catholic homophobia. By helping fill the ranks of the priesthood, they bolster the institutional church and, accordingly, its influence and ability to promote its anti-gay views.
They lack even the excuse that they are helping to change the church. Catholic doctrine since the Apostle Paul has been adamantly anti-gay. And that is not going to change, absent the divine intervention of a holy spirit that has not intervened on the issue in two grim millennia.