Priesthood haven for homosexuals

Large numbers of gays are being drawn to roles in the Catholic Church, writes PAUL VALLELY.

LONDON - The Catholic priesthood in Britain is fast becoming a gay profession.

Proportionately, those training to be priests include significantly more homosexuals than there are in the general population, says the rector of one of the Church's seven English seminaries, Father Kevin Haggerty of St John's at Wonersh, Surrey.

As well, an increasing number of gay men are training to be priests at other seminaries.

Father James Overton, the rector of Allen Hall in Westminster diocese, has said "a sizeable number" of his students are now homosexual - a trend which could cause "enormous problems" in seminaries.



And now a forthcoming British Channel 4 documentary, Queer and Catholic, is to allege that, while many of the gay men remain celibate, others do not.

Homosexual sex - which the Catholic Church insists is "grave depravity" - has taken place inside the English College in Rome, where elite candidates for the priesthood are sent.

The programme claims that seminarians there have also cruised Rome's gay bars and parks.

Student priests in the college frequently referred to one another by girls' names and the culture in parts of some seminaries is one of "high camp."

Taken together, all this suggests that, a gay subculture is emerging in some seminaries, similar to that which has developed in the United States, where it has been suggested that as many as a quarter of American priests are gay.

Father Donald Cozzens, rector of one of the leading US seminaries, St Mary's in Cleveland, Ohio, suggested that among priests under the age of 40 it could be as high as 60 per cent. It was reported last year that the number of priests who had died of Aids was proportionally four times that of the general population. American seminaries now demand an Aids test before ordination.

Cozzens wrote in a book called The Changing Face of the Priesthood: "The priesthood of the 21st century will likely be perceived as a predominantly gay profession." Seminaries, he said, were becoming "significantly gay" places.

At Ushaw College in Durham, the rector, Father Jim O'Keefe, queries the American figures but acknowledges there is now an issue to be addressed in English seminaries.

A former seminarian, Chris Higgins, reveals in the documentary, to be broadcast in Britain tomorrow, an occasion on which some trainee priests who "had had more to drink than others" became "very tactile and physical with each other in the refectory."

Soon after, noises came from one student's room.

"It was obviously two people having sex," the ex-priest says. "To cover the noise the person in the next room put on a Take That CD at full volume, which got the attention of most of the students in college who came down to the corridor to ask him to turn it down.

"When he did, everyone could hear the noise of the two people having sex coming from the room next door."

Students, even before they become priests, have made a promise of celibacy.

But Higgins says: "Some defined celibacy as not falling in love, so one-night stands were permitted. It could be in a bush in a park, but your heart still belonged to God, to the priesthood and the Church. What you did with your body was just flesh."

Yet such casuistry is not what will most dismay the Vatican which is, after all, now used to weathering sex scandals about priests being found dead in massage parlours, getting caught downloading huge porn collections from the internet or being found to have interfered with children. What will set the biggest alarm bells ringing in Rome is the suggestion that the Catholic priesthood in Britain could within a couple of generations become a gay profession.

A variety of reasons are given for the disproportionate figures. Some commentators suggest that the theology of a male God has homo-erotic overtones to gay men. Others say that there are more gays in the caring and acting professions and that the priesthood is subconsciously assumed to be a mixture of both.

Seminary rectors are concerned about those candidates who are confused or unhappy with their sexual orientation - and who think that a vow of celibacy will diffuse their internal confusions.

O'Keefe says: "Among some there's a presumption that, once they're ordained, sexual temptation will be easier to cope with."

He disputes that the number of gay priests is anything like the US surveys suggest, but acknowledges that disproportionate numbers of gay seminarians is a real issue.

"But sexual danger does not go away, for heterosexuals or gays," he says.

"The question is not whether a man is homosexual or not. It is whether he has integrated his orientation into his personality and ministry. Does he have the emotional experience to relate to a wide range of people at significant depth?

"Anyone who can find security only in an exclusive homosexual sub-group would find it extremely difficult to cope with the breadth and depth of relationship needed in parish life."

Ushaw College has introduced female theology students to the college, which O'Keefe hopes will broaden the emotional experience of trainees.

At Wonersh, Haggerty agrees. "It is very limiting to categorise people by their sexuality; there's no one type of homosexual," he says.

"But subcultures are a danger we're aware of. They are inappropriate for the priesthood anyway; they are divisive and ultimately unjust and contrary to the openness required of a priest."

What worries him is the camp culture that arises among gays in some seminaries. In the English College in Rome, according to Higgins, his fellow students were known by nicknames including Daisy, Phyllis, Mavis and Big Shirl.

Rectors have two anxieties about this.

Cozzens says: "Heterosexual seminarians are made uncomfortable by the number of gays around them. The straight seminarian feels out of place and may interpret his inner destabilisation as a sign that he does not have a vocation for the priesthood."

But more significantly, O'Keefe says, it reveals something about the emotional development of candidates. It implies, he says, a lack of adult psycho-sexual maturity.

Gay theologian James Alison says: "The priesthood has always been a gay profession. It was for centuries the safest space for homosexuals in Western civilisation."

In a century in which women have entered most of the once exclusively male preserves - from the law and the press to the Army and the police - "things which were part of the natural world until then now look like a gay subculture," he says.

What Rome thinks about all this is not clear. Two of its main bodies, the Congregation for Education, which supervises seminaries, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog, are both believed to be considering the issue.

Vatican education officials are said to be sympathetic to priests of homosexual orientation.

But the Most Rev Tarcisio Bertone, an archbishop and the secretary of the body formerly known as the Holy Inquisition, has let slip that he believes it is "self-evident" that seminaries should refuse admittance to gays.

Although the homosexual inclination is not sinful in itself, the archbishop says, it "evokes moral concern" because it is a strong temptation to actions that "are always in themselves evil."

"Persons with a homosexual inclination should not be admitted to the seminary."

Such a line could have significant repercussions for English seminaries and for the survival of the Catholic priesthood in Britain in the 21st century.

It could further alienate many of the gay Catholics to whom Cardinal Basil Hume went out of his way to offer support over the last two decades with the words "love can never be wrong."

And yet it is quite possible that the present regime in the Vatican could take such a line. Elizabeth Stuart, professor of theology at King Alfred's College, Winchester, who is one of the Catholic Church's most prominent lesbian theologians, says: "Part of the panic is the fear that the Church's whole sexual ethic is going to be unravelled."

The idea that all sex must be for procreation is the common link that binds the Catholic ban on contraception and homosexuality. A shift in the unrelenting attitude to gay sex, she says, "threatens to overthrow ... the Church's sexual teaching."

The crucial thing for Alison is whether homosexuals in the Church now acknowledge their homosexuality or hide from it. "But even that is a threat to Rome, because a man who openly says 'I am' is a challenge to the teaching that homosexuality is an objective disorder ...

"The Church's teaching is untenable. The top men in the Vatican know that but don't know what to do about it." One response has been to try to silence those who promote the homosexual cause within the Church.

An American nun, Sister Jeannine Gramick was barred from ministering to gays because she refused to condemn those in her care. Then she was told she could not speak publicly about her silencing.

"Homosexuality is a time bomb ticking in the Church," she says. "I think it is going to explode very soon."

- INDEPENDENT