Located at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Catholic Handbook PURL: http://purl.oclc.org/NET/lgbh/ [A PURL is an OCLC maintained "Persistant URL" which will always point to the real location of a website] Letter to the Pope from a Gay Priest from The National Catholic Reporter December 18, 1992 OPINION This letter takes the unusual (for NCR) form of an open letter to the [pope. The author no longer lack the courage to speak in his own name, yet wishes his name be withheld for the sake of others who would be [identified by association. The piece has been edited slightly for style [and grace] "IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT HURTS ME, HOW CAN YOU TRULY LOVE ME?" Dear Holy Father, There once was a Hasidic rabbi. One day, a disciple, in a burst of feeling, exclaimed, "My master, I love you!" The rabbi looked up from his books and asked, "Do you know what hurts me, my son?" The disciple was puzzled: "Why do you confuse me with your irrelevant question?" "If you do not know what hurts me," replied the rabbi, "how can you truly love me?" I am a Catholic priest, I am on leave of absence from ministry. I am gay. I have wrestled with your June 25 letter to the American Bishops, in which you urged them to advocate legal discrimination against gays and lesbians under certain conditions. Your letter hurt me deeply. You have hurt many good and generous men and women. In "The Heart of the Matter," Graham Greene observes that "the church knows all the rules, but it doesn't know what goes on in a single heart." Let me tell you, Holy Father, what goes on in my heart. During my years of ministry, I have been a teacher, a parish priest, a hospital chaplain, a prison chaplain and a missionary. For most of those years, I was asexual. The road to acknowledging and embracing myself, not simply as a sexual being, but as a gay man, has been long and brutal. I was raised in a traditional Irish-American Catholic family. Sex was seldom mentioned, and then only in oblique, guarded fashion. My mother had been sexually abused as child, as had her three sisters. For her, sex was a source of pain and humiliation. My father lived at home until he was 35. He was a momma's boy who wanted his wife to mother him. From their own confused and painful pasts. they formed a peculiar, symbiotic relationship, managing to raise me in a sexually neutered world. I was raised to believe that people with bodies who had sexual potential were to be feared. At the age of 19 I almost died from perforated ulcers. Normal adolescent feelings that had been given no expression imploded. Soon after my recuperation, midway through college, I entered a religious order of priests and brothers. I was young, eager and generous of heart. And I was very naive about sex. When I entered community, I knew very little about my own body and even less about sex in general. During the three years of novitiate, we had only one conference on sexuality, specially on the vow of chastity. The novice master handed us a sheet on which were drawn the figures of a woman and a man. The highlight of his stammering lecture came when he told us in which direction a woman's pubic hair pointed and in which a man's. I no longer remember if we were more embarrassed for him or for ourselves. At another conference, he warned us that inevitably we each would fall in love with someone in the novitiate. This would be just "puppy love." These feelings should be ignored. This priest, who told us to ignore such feelings, was a man who took three showers a day and enjoyed playing one-on-one basketball with the hunky jocks in our class. As I say, we were so naive. Some of us acted on our feelings. 'Special friendships' were formed. Homoerotic feelings overwhelmed most of us. The feelings frightened me. Censuring both the desires and myself, I reverted to asexuality. I threw myself into prayer and broke off my friendship with the man who aroused such intense feelings within me. He left the community two years later. In all that time I never spoke with him again, except when needed. Others in the class were not as "disciplined" as I. Liaisons were formed and reformed. Some fell in love with others in community, while some fell in love with coeds at the nearby college where we took classes. I now believe that only one or two of my brothers had any sense of sexual identity. Those who had the courage to explore their sexual inclinations and desires emerged from the novitiate with a much clearer sense of who they were. Four left before vows. Three of them were gay, the fourth straight. In the following years, five of the six of us who took vows would leave. The lone "survivor" is a much-gifted man, but clearly asexual. During my years of formation, I received the ready trust of my brothers. Perhaps my being asexual gave them the freedom to confide in me. Without ever having to "dig," i knew all the "dirt" in community. And what most of this "dirt' involved was the sharing with me of their faltering and frightened selves. The years of formation -- when the furtive, nightly openings and closings of bedroom doors and the stealthy tip-toeing up and down back stairwells took on the character of a French bedroom farce. The years of formation -- when harmones raged, loneliness stalked the cloistered, antiseptic halls, and young men, filled with genuine religious idealism, confused and randy, tumbled into each other's arms and beds. The years of formation -- when a friend was propositioned on the very night of his vows; when a close friend ran off with his spiritual director; and when the vocation director left and moved in with a young man who had applied for admission to the order. The years of formation -- when none of this was every openly addressed in community; and when sexuality was never discussed with us by anyone who was in a position of responsibility for our "formation." Conferences and house meetings were devoted primarily to examining the vow of poverty. If we weren't talking about how to live a simple life-style, we were talking about what we should be doing for the marginalized of society. The years of formation -- when homosexuality was a regular topic at the religious leadership conference meetings. But whatever was whispered behind closed committee doors certainly was not shared with any of the formation communities I lived in. But how could those in charge of our formation speak to the issues of sexuality when they themselves had never fully addressed those same issues in their own lives? They had gone through a course of religious training that demanded they become unfeeling eunuchs. We had so few role models of psychosexually healthy men, striving to lead lives of joy, secure in their sexual identity, be it gay or straight. One day, years after the years of formation, after jumping through the hoops leading to ordination, I awoke and realized I was profoundly unhappy. I sensed something was missing from my life, but I didn't know what. I was so unhappy that it frightened me into seeking professional psychiatric help. I was diagnosed as being clinically depressed. At first, I didn't comprehend the diagnosis. I loved being a priest. I was an effective preacher, in demand for weddings and baptisms. People surrounded me with affection and constantly validated me call to ministry. When I shared the news with friends, they were as confused as I. I was too effective a priest to be depressed. And yet I was, to the point of being suicidal. All I wanted to do was lie down and die. I thought that maybe if I prayed more or practiced more religious devotions, the heavi- ness would lift. But it didn't. I entered what would be a long, dark night of the soul. Meister Eckhart said that compassion begins at home with one's own soul and body. I had no home. After years of discipline I had become divorced from my feelings and my body. I needed to find a home within my body. As it revolted years before in the form of ulcers, so now me body started shutting down. I could no longer go on living in the spirit realm alone. I needed to own that I was a sexual being. Having gone through life as a eunuch for the sake of my parents and the church. I engaged in the struggle to come to terms with my sexual identity. I chose to go on a leave of absence from public ministry so as not to give scandal as I experienced what I should have experienced as an adolescent. After years of dark, agonizing pain, I am only now coming into my own as a sexual person. The gift of that struggle has been to recognize that I am a gay man. I do not feel shame in saying that. I have suffered for too long. And I have lived my life with such genero- sity that I am not willing to have you, Holy Father, or anyone else tell me that I am immoral. You say that homosexual love is a disorder. I reject that prejudice. I look at the Christian gays and lesbians who have entered me life over the years and I simply do not believe that their lives and loves are contrary to "the creative wisdom of God." The witness of their lives compel me to believe that their lives are a part of God's creative wisdom. You have insulted me, Holy Father, with your letter. You have deeply hurt me. From you, I expect the most basic of what I have extended to others: elementary kindness. But your letter was not kind. Your letter was vile, filled with scorn and arrogance. Shame on you, Holy Father, for writing such a letter at a time when hate crimes, particularly against gays, are on the rise in this country; when the rate of gay teen suicides is proportionally higher than any other group's/ Shame on you for releasing a letter advocating discrimination at the time when medical leaders were meeting at the World AIDS Confe- rence, a conference that could not be held in the United States because of government discrimination against HIV-infected people. There are so many other letters you could have written. The world needs hope and encouragement; you offer words of contempt. My parents violated my trust when they suppressed the sexual development of my being. You now violate both my faith journey toward health and the legacy of my ministry by telling me I am disordered and entitled to live with "dignity" only if I hide my sexual identity and live as a eunuch. I will not let you say that men like me cannot love. I will not give over to you that power. I will not live a life of denial, for that would be to live an unnatural and unhealthy life. Sadly, though, denial is a way of life in our church. And the denial and secrecy is strangling us. All of us. Holy Father, let me tell you a "secret." Many, many priests in the American clergy are gay. I am not a sociologist or an anthropologist or even a pollster. I am simply a priest who has lived in a variety of communities and apostolates. At no time did I ever live in a community where gays did not make up at least half of the community. We are everywhere in the church. My priest friends and acquaintances are presidents of secondary schools, they are fund-raisers and administrators in one of the nation's most rabidly homophobic chanceries. They are retreat directors, vocation direc-tors, chaplains and parish priests. They are moral theologians and canon lawyers. And yes, Holy Father, some of my friends are even in your back-yard, teaching at the theological jewel of the church. They are good men, Some are celibate; others live compromised lives. With-out exception, they are men who love being priests in today's crazy world, and they are men who live in fear and secrecy. They are men who strive mightily to be ministers of healing and hope in a world gone amok but who, in the privacy of their rooms, are wracked with confusion and guilt and aching hearts. They are men who have struggled to be reflections of God's compassion in our world but who do not know how to love their own selves. Too few of them are full-grown men, for so many are caught in the traps and lies perpetuated by a church that takes the verb to love and conjugates it to procreate. There is so much needless pain because of the secrecy and denial. When we deny the reality that we priests are sexual beings, we become something less than what we are meant to be. Denial leads to distortion. I think of my friend, a fellow priest, who simply could not endure the loneliness. One night, he called a 1-900 gay phone-sex line in which callers are randomly connected with other callers. There, in the darkness of his cloistered room, much to his surprise, he found himself connected to a classmate with whom he had studied theology. I think of an elderly priest, a kind, considerate man. A retired professor of classics. The most prominent picture in his room was that of Michel-angelo's David. The story whispered at drinks in the rec room is that one night he tried to pick up a young fellow at a bar, but the fellow was an undercover cop. The priest was arrested for solicitation. The matter was handled through the "proper channels" and public scandal was avoided. But there were no "proper channels" in community for addressing either this incident or his pain. His story became fodder for gossip. He stayed away from bars after that, alone in his room with David's virile image. And then there is the alcoholic priest, well into his middle years, whose sickness no one in community acknowledges. Shortly after I arrived, when he was three sheets to the wind, he shared with me his fondest wish: "Oh to be 21 and black and living in Rio during Carnival time." And he is moderator of the school's water polo team. Yes, those are scandalous stories. But the scandal rests not in the desperate carnal desires of these men so much as it does in that these men could be allowed to live in shrouds of secrecy so think that no one can hear their anguish. Silence equals death. In the Oakland diocese a hospice was founded to care for priests dying of AIDS virus. No one came. Priests feared what their bishops would say. The hospice has been turned over to another care group. In my own community, six members nationwide have died from AIDS, but the obituary of only one priest acknowledged that he has dies from the AIDS virus. Even in death, we are being told to go to God in denial and shame. The American theologian William Stringfellow described "listening" as a primitive act of love in which one gives one's self to another's word; becoming vulnerable to that word. Who will listen to our stories? You, Holy Father, have shown yourself to be a man unwilling to listen. But our stories cry out to God. You write that "the church has the responsibility to promote the public morality of the entire civil society." Yes. But the church's first responsibility is to listen with an honest and open heart to the story of its people, however uncomfortable their stories may make the "church" feel. The American priesthood is in crisis. Much has been written about that crisis. Much has been written denying that crisis. The truth, though, is that much of this crisis rests in our refusal to acknowledge and embrace that we are embodied people. Our basic yearnings to love and be loved are choked by confusion and torment. Centuries ago, the gentle Jesuit Father Pierre Favre wrote that we magnify God's strictness with a zeal that God's self will not own. This what you have done, Holy Father. You condemn with a shrill voice that of which you know so little. As I began with a story, so let me end with one. Elie Wiesel, a man who has listened to the cries of the persecuted and has heard God's voice of compassion in their stories, believes that when we die and go to heaven, God is not going to say to us, "Why didn't you become a messiah? Why didn't you discover the cure for such and such?" The only thing going to be asked at that precious moment is, "Why didn't you become you?" Holy Father, in its own perverse way, your letter to the American bishops lays this challenge before all of us who are gay -- the challenge to become ourselves.