Dangers of scalp hunting

There is much that I agree with in Father Paul Shaughnessy’s article, “The Gay Priest Problem” (November 2000). However, there are some things in the article that must be challenged.

I should admit at the beginning that I do not qualify as honest according to Father Shaughnessy, who says, “it should be stated flatly that the word homophobia will not be found in the mouth of an honest man.” When a group of thugs make a practice of beating up on lone homosexuals because they are homosexual, I am tempted to call them homophobic. What do honest people call them?

Nor do I pass the article’s sanity test, because I agree with Bishop Gumbleton that seminarians should be educated about celibacy. Father Shaughnessy claims: “It is difficult to imagine a psychologically healthy 15-year-old boy, much less a seminarian, who would not have a wholly adequate and complete idea of ‘what celibacy is.’” At that age a boy will understand that celibacy means not getting married and not engaging in sexual activity; but Pope John Paul II (Pastores Dabo Vobis, 44) and those other insane people in Rome who mandated instruction in seminaries on the meaning of sex and celibacy seem to think that the 15-year-old might have something else to learn in order to sustain a healthy celibate life.

I wonder whether Father Shaughnessy has considered the practical implications of his prescription for choosing bishops. “Rome should make it clear that, before a man can be considered episcopal material, he needs scalps hanging from his belt.” These scalps belonged to homosexuals whom the candidate has sent home from seminaries or had removed from ecclesiastical office. Granted, the failure of a person in a responsible position to weed out unsuitable candidate or holders of ecclesiastical offices should count against them as episcopal material; but seriously, do you want to make this a precondition for being named a bishop? Does Father Shaughnessy really wish to disqualify any priest who has not been privy to the sexual secrets of seminarians or holders of ecclesiastical office?

And what about my favorite candidate for episcopacy? If he has dealt with unsuitable candidates for priesthood, I imagine he has quietly advised—perhaps pressured—them to leave the seminary, following his clear moral obligation to keep the matter confidential. Being private, this fulfillment of his duty does not constitute a “scalp” that Rome can count. Episcopal appointments will have to come from a less discreet crowd.

Father Shaughnessy believes that homosexuals should not be admitted to seminaries and that homosexual priests should be given a chance to change their orientation by undergoing therapy. Otherwise they are out. I presume they are also to be dismissed if their therapy fails. He is talking about all homosexuals here—not merely those who are sexually active. Granted, there are special issues to be dealt with when a homosexual man begins to discern a call either to priesthood or to religious life, and it would take a number of pages to explain. On the other hand, I suspect that most of those who have been spiritual directors to priests know of a number of homosexual men who have lived lives of exemplary chastity and fidelity throughout their priestly lives. For most, their sexual orientation is known to their spiritual director and to a few if any others, so they are safe from the scalp hunters; but what if one of them should fall under the suspicion of a Father Shaughnessy risen to power? Will this excellent man—regardless of age or record—be shipped off to a therapy that may or may not work, and then be dismissed from the vocation in which he served faithfully, if the therapy doesn’t work?

Sexual immorality in the priesthood, heterosexual or homosexual, is a serious problem wherever it occurs. But this is not the way to deal with it.

—Father John C. Gallagher
Edmonton, Alberta

The author responds:

Point one: A thug who beats up on a homosexual because he is homosexual is called a thug. A thug who beats up on an Asian woman because she is an Asian woman is called a thug. The use of political and pseudo-psychological jargon is a hindrance, not a help, to moral clarity. No one, I repeat, invokes the term “homophobia” unless he wishes to blur the distinction between impermissible violence against the innocent and permissible opposition to the maleficent.

Point two: Pope John Paul II’s Pastores Dabo Vobis (44) calls for “education of the moral conscience” and study of the “nuptial meaning” of the human body as the Church understands it. These are precisely the elements I argued to be missing from sexuality education. Now Bishop Gumbleton is quoted as saying: “How is one to live the teachings of Jesus’ love as a gay person? There is no guidance from the Church at all,” and elsewhere, “I hope that within our Church every gay person, every lesbian person, every bisexual person, or transgendered person will come out, because that is how our Church is going to truly change . . . I would say this especially to priests and bishops in our Church.” [my emphasis] For Gumbleton, the Church is the problem, not the solution. Do gay and transgendered persons stand out for their wholehearted embrace of Catholic doctrine on the nuptial meaning of the body? Does the “sexuality workshop” crew really wish to instruct future priests in this doctrine? You make the call.

Point three: If priestly formation and the episcopacy were healthy, the discreet approach to getting rid of miscreants would work. If an institution is corrupt, however, it can’t be reformed by managers more concerned about public relations than about subversion. My reasoning is: if thou hast shown thyself gutsy in small things, thou shalt show thyself gutsy in greater.

Point four: As Dr. Joseph Nicolosi argues, those who call themselves homosexuals are more accurately diagnosed as “heterosexuals with a homosexual problem.” Just as many alcoholics resist a change of life on the grounds that “my family is genetically predisposed this way,” many men with homosexual problems use the same excuse to avoid treatment. The road to freedom can require heroic sanctity and courage. But put this question to a recovered alcoholic: Who showed you the truer compassion, the friend who accepted your old, familiar excuses, or the friend who refused to?

Never so impressed

As a 65-year-old married male Catholic, I cannot recall ever being so impressed as I am by the truly inspired and courageous essay by Father Paul Shaughnessy. Talk about telling it like it is—and as it should be!

May God bless him as he so richly deserves.

—Joseph Pelej
By email

Going on record

This article by Father Paul Shaughnessy confirms the judgment I made months ago, that CWR is the best periodical in English published on behalf of Catholicism. My subscription list includes and has included more than a few. I wanted to stand and cheer when I read the powerful challenge to the US hierarchy to begin the cleansing of the stables. With this report in hand I am ready to lend my support to those who take the initiative, and may even, in my advanced years, take a few modest initiatives myself. For instance, is it necessary for our parish bulletin to advertise a Gay-Lesbian seminar in a neighboring city? I am ready to put my dissent on record.

—Leland D. Peterson
Norfolk, Virginia

Innuendo leading to farce

Father Paul Shaughnessy has stitched together a disconcerting essay on alleged clerical transgressions, using source material as diverse as a report from the Kansas City Star, a “typical” comment from a gay Catholic priest, and a letter from one Reginald Cawcutt, identified as a gay bishop from South Africa. In the letter, Cawcutt is quoted, using vile language, to be seeking volunteers from fellow gay clergy to sodomize Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Father Shaughnessy goes on to observe, “While the virulence of his language may be exceptional, the targets of his antagonism (i.e. the ecclesiastical hierarchy) are not.”

Throughout the article Father Shaughnessy employs innuendo and poorly sourced material to make charges that homosexual practices are widespread among the clergy, and corrupt bishops are indifferent to this outrage. Assuming that there are grains of truth in his tale, sorting them out and evaluating them objectively is hampered because of the reckless and, dare I say, uncharitable way Father Shaughnessy mounts his attack. Before starting, he would have done well to reflect upon the Old Testament story of Hosea. The prophet Hosea’s wife, whom he loved, deserted the family, possibly to become a ritual prostitute in one of the fertility cults against which Hosea preached ferociously. Throughout his agony Hosea came to understand God’s love for his people. He came to know that, while consequences for evil are necessary, the evildoer can always be redeemed, brought back, and reinstated. This is exactly what Hosea did with his wife. Priests in difficulty should have the right to be treated with similar compassion.

The homosexual problem is described by Shaughnessy as being of crisis proportions. Unfortunately, some of his suggested remedies are so irrelevant as to be farcical. What are we to make of his premise that when a priest removes his Roman collar, he is up to no good? If that is the case, what are we to think of the Jesuit priests in my home area who staff Boston College, and who routinely wear non-clerical garb? There is no dress code for the Jesuits at Boston College; are we to assume that those who choose “civvies” are more profligate than their clerically attired confreres? Have the large number of nuns who no longer wear traditional religious habits adopted iniquitous behavior along with their new clothes? How do we evaluate Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who quit the Loretto Order to establish a new congregation of nuns, the Missionaries of Charity? Why did she adopt, for the new order, the indigenous secular costume of the country, the Indian sari, rather than a traditional religious habit?

In my four years of active service as a naval officer, except during Mass and other religious liturgies, I don’t recall ever seeing a chaplain dressed in anything other than a naval officer’s uniform, or appropriate non-clerical civilian attire. Maybe things have changed, but I can’t imagine Chaplain Shaughnessy leaving his quarters in Pearl Harbor wearing a Roman collar (or perhaps a cassock and Roman collar!) to take a stroll along Waikiki Beach.

—Charles O. Coudert
Sherborn, Massachusetts

The author responds:

Innuendo? Alleged clerical transgressions? It seems I failed to make myself clear. I did not intend to insinuate widespread clerical sodomy; I intended to assert the fact emphatically. As for the reliability of my sources, I confess I do not possess videotapes of the relevant persons in flagrante delicto. To those for whom this is the only standard of proof, my allegations will seem reckless. But most of us are more realistic. Some years ago Roddy Wright, the bishop of Argyle and the Isles in Scotland, was accused by many persons, including his housekeeper, of philandering. For many years those who wished to ignore the accusations and to accept the bishop’s denials prevailed over his detractors. Then it transpired that the bishop had sired a child (two, in fact, by different mistresses), and even his defenders were obliged to take this as proof. Until recently, homosexual intercourse could be betrayed by nothing as definitive as bastardy, and if the participating parties remained steadfast in denial even the most flagrantly compromising behavior could be explained away. And it was. The incursion of AIDS changed all that. Had I hinged my arguments on the number of priests with pierced ears or Liza Minelli CDs, I could justly be taxed with innuendo, but in the clerical population HIV infection provides an entirely objective index of homosexual behavior: not “grains of truth,” corpses. As for the inability of the episcopacy to preempt the police in identifying its own scoundrels, most Catholics will accept this as evidence that the institution is corrupt. For others, of course, it depends what the meaning of “is” is.

A word on Mother Teresa. The white sari worn by her sisters is in fact widow’s garb in Bengal, and most of the habit and wimple garments traditionally worn by nuns were an adaptation of the distinctive widow’s dress of Flanders or Italy. Mother Teresa’s innovation was in reality a recovery of an ancient practice. The sari reflects the sisters’ “widowhood to the world” as unambiguously as a monk’s cowl. As Father Joseph Fessio once responded to a young Jesuit who suggested that civvies were suitable for off-duty wear, “Can you imagine Mother Teresa wearing a blouse?”

Habited nuns tell me that the most fiercely negative reactions to their garb comes, not from laymen, but from other sisters in lay dress. No one can argue plausibly any longer that sisters in pantsuits accomplish more than Missionaries of Charities in their saris, or that priests in golf shirts can do priestly work that those in clerics cannot. I see no problem in secular professionals dressing like secular professionals, but when priests and nuns dress like secular professionals it always reflects some level of vocational unease. Not always, but too often, this unease is related to mischief. You ask, are we to assume that those Jesuits who choose “civvies” are more profligate than their clerically attired confreres? Well, imagine two priests riding the subway home at midnight, one in sport clothes, one in Roman collar. Which can you say with more confidence did not spend the evening at the Sharon Stone film, or in an adult bookstore, or at a gay bar?

Time to clean house

Was it coincidence that the November issues of both America and Catholic World Report offered solutions to the “crisis” the priesthood in America, and these by two American priests? Father Donald Cozzens in America pleads for honest dialogue, while Father Paul Shaughnessy in CWR says we need to clean house.

What makes the priesthood difficult today is not the long hours or changing cultures, which priests of all ages have endured. It’s our low morale, caused by the betrayal or stupidity in our own ranks. It’s seeing priests watch daytime TV. It’s hearing priests justify unnatural vices. It’s living with priests who prefer getting a little drunk before supper rather than praying the breviary together.

I’m not against discussion groups, but the only way to raise our morale is to—well, clean house.

—Father Joseph Illo
Vocations Director, Diocese of Stockton
Stockton, California

Acknowledging episcopal corruption

The entire essay by Father Paul Shaughnessy was excellent, but I feel that I would be remiss if I did not say that the paragraph beginning at the bottom of page 56—where he explained what he meant by saying that the American bishops’ conference is corrupt—was priceless. I don’t think I have ever read anything quite so clear in explaining the problems that we face in the American Church—not just regarding homosexuality, but regarding the health of the Church in general terms. Father Shaughnessy is brave enough to speak plainly. The Church is suffering from corruption in the hierarchy. We’ve been thinking that for years; now he’s finally said it. Congratulations to him—and to you for bringing his charge!

—Anthony Guarducci
Chester, Pennsylvania

The Humanae Vitae connection

I would like to send Father Paul Shaughnessy a letter of congratulations. I think he is correct in designating dissent from Humanae Vitae as a huge source of the problem. In 1970 self-described dissenter Michael Valente wrote that in rejecting Humanae Vitae, dissenters thereby rejected the whole natural-law theory and no longer had a natural-law basis for ruling out any imaginable behavior between consenting persons or even bestiality.

In 1977, the CTSA authors of Human Sexuality argued that homosexual sodomy was the moral equivalent of marital contraception by Catholics, and certainly the latter was not condemned as universally immoral. If I recall correctly, then-Archbishop Joseph Bernardin led the American bishops to condemn the book. By chance I had an appointment to see him the day after he had stayed up all night reading it. He was clearly upset by it, and I found this a bit puzzling because it was my understanding that this sort of “moral theology” was common in seminaries around the country, including his own.

What Father Shaughnessy did not point out is that the vast majority of American Catholic married couples have been living unchastely since the contraceptive revolution in the Church, a process led by Fathers Charles Curran and Richard McCormick, SJ, and fostered by many other clergy and educators. If living rightly helps to build up the body of Christ, then this massive objectively sinful living has had a downward spiraling spiritual and psychological effect on the clergy as well as the laity.

The promotion and teaching of marital chastity through natural family planning has not been made easier by the unhappy matters in Father Shaughnessy’s article. Fortunately, since the 30th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, a number of bishops have issued pastoral letters to reaffirm its teaching, and each year more and more chaste priests are making a complete NFP course a normal part of preparation for marriage, a practice urged by a US bishops’ committee back in 1989.

As a sign of hope, allow me to share an excerpt from a letter I recently read:

In the early years of our marriage we used the Pill. When we began changing our eating habits [to something more healthy], the Pill seemed incompatible so we began using a diaphragm. When this proved [unsatisfactory], we finally investigated an announcement of NFP classes in our church bulletin. We learned the method and have been using it ever since. At first we didn’t agree with the moral view presented, but gradually we came to embrace the whole message of NFP presented by CCL, and we are now grateful to be following the magisterium of the Church.

—John F. Kippley
Founder, Couple to Couple League
Cincinnati Ohio

The key is self-control

Thank you for your coverage of the clergy and the homosexual question. There will be a turnabout for the good once the unstated truth about clerical celibacy is constantly proclaimed: that a vital reason for it is to inspire the whole of society toward the vital importance of sexual self-control.

—Father Bryan Storey
London, England

The warrior’s approach

I once heard a Marine general state: “We’re the folks who kill people and break things.” That thought came to me as I read Marine chaplain Paul Shaughnessy’s piece. My reaction stems only partly from the bulk of his article, which I found to be an aggressive but for the most part not too unbalanced presentation of a growing “problem” for the Church. It stems from a few of his choices of material (e.g., the quotation from Bishop Cawcutt) and from a few of his judgments, and mostly from his three sections setting forth his proposed solutions for Rome, for bishops, and for the rest of us. It is in these that Father Shaughnessy reveals his true perspective, which strikes me as remarkably Marine- and warrior-like, but at the same time terribly un-Christian.

Father Shaughnessy would deny admission to seminaries or to orders any who were “found out” to be gay. “Do ask, do tell,” he urges. He would drive from the active ministry any who were found to be gay and who declined to seek “reparative therapy by which they may be freed from their disorder.” By these positions, he makes it clear that in his world, only heterosexual men are qualified for orders. He also makes it clear that in his world, homosexuality is not a status or an unalterable orientation, but an unforgivable moral fault.

It seems to me that I could not change my orientation from heterosexual to homosexual, with or without “reparative therapy,” and I suspect that Father Shaughnessy could not change his, either. My reading over the year leads me to the conclusion that most who have seriously studied the issue agree that it is no different for those who are gay. I thus question whether any amount of “reparative therapy” will change someone who is gay into someone who is “straight.” I also question the proposed remedy: to ban all gay men, no matter how holy or virtuous, from orders.

Should the issue really be the sexual orientation of someone who believes himself called to priesthood? Should it not rather be a variety of other, more traditional factors, including the level of virtue that the individual has achieved? Every one of us is called to holiness, and to live a life of virtue. That includes chastity for all, and celibacy for those in orders. As a married layman I am called to chastity, and it would be a matter for confession were I to seek out someone other than my wife for “aid and comfort.” A single person has freedoms to seek out and court members of the opposite sex, which would be sinful for me, but always there are limitations and bounds. Someone seeking a life in religion or in orders, even before vows, is subject to appropriate limitations of conduct toward others which are more restrictive than for those who are laymen and women. But in every case, virtue must be practiced.

Father Shaughnessy seems to equate the status of being a gay priest with (necessarily) living an illicit, sexually active lifestyle. This strikes me as nonsense—and as insulting to all those who are gay and are living lives of holiness and chastity in orders. Would he conclude that all single heterosexual men are necessarily (illicitly) sexually active? Or that all heterosexual priests read “slick magazines” and none of them have “the habit of saying No to himself?” If “physical comfort is the oxygen that feeds the fires of homosexual indulgence,” does it not also degrade virtue in heterosexual priests?

It should never occur to me or to any layperson even to wonder about the sexual orientation of our priests. I expect priests to live up to their vows, and would be saddened to find that one had not done so. That would be an issue for that priest and his confessor and spiritual director. Father Shaughnessy indicates that there are vast numbers of gay priests who apparently think it quite all right to visit resorts which cater to gay priests, to live an openly gay lifestyle, and otherwise to act in a way that is inconsistent with their vows, even to a regular practice of being sexually active with other gay priests. If this is true, then I ask, where are their confessors? Where are their spiritual directors? Where are their superiors who should be aware (are duty-bound to be aware) and take appropriate action in such cases?

If men are being ordained who are known by their seminary rectors to be sexually active, then the Church has a very serious problem. If priests are openly engaging in sexual vices, without any response from their superiors, then the Church has a very serious problem. If we have allowed a culture to develop within certain religious orders or dioceses which encourages or condones such behavior, then the Church has a very serious problem. But the solution to such problems is not now to deny priesthood based only on sexual orientation. The solution is (as it always was) to require that candidates prove their worthiness through long study and growth in virtue, and close examination. The solution is not automatically to eliminate from ministry all who are gay. Not only is this not a good pastoral solution, it is an unjust one to those gay men who have been called to the priesthood. (I assume that Father Shaughnessy would not set down for our belief the tenet that God issues vocations to religious life only to heterosexuals, and does not call any gay men or lesbians to religion.)

The idea that the only priest worthy of being elevated to the episcopacy is one with “scalps [of gay priests] hanging from his belt” is surely one which would offend virtually all of us who love the Church and hope for eternal life through living a life of caring for others and seeking and loving Christ in all we meet. Father Shaughnessy’s is a “killing people and breaking things” solution—perhaps appropriate for Marines in combat, but hardly the right answer to a problem of the failure to practice virtue by some number of priests, or the failure of the Church as an institution to exercise the kind of discipline which is needed. Surely we can do better.

—Kevin J. Barry
Chantilly, Virginia

The author responds:

Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not a question of whether or not to “take scalps;” the only question is who uses the knife and who gets it. Scores upon scores of candidates for the priesthood have gotten the chop in the past twenty years because the vocation director or the novice master or the seminary rector deemed them “too rigid.” And on what grounds were they judged to be rigid? On the grounds that they assented to Church teaching on homosexual acts, and thereby indicated that they lacked the pastoral flexibility necessary “to minister in our multicultural Church.” If you find me lacking in compassion, I urge you to approach half a dozen seminary deans at random and bemoan the loss to the Church of seminarians expelled for this particular rigidity: take note of their empathy and concern.

When any institution is hit by scandal, its responsible officers will respond in one of two ways. One group reacts by spiking the story, underplaying the seriousness of the problem, stressing the positive, and generally insisting that the institution is healthy: for these persons the harm of scandal is principally the harm to reputations. The other group responds by taking steps so that the actions that gave rise to the scandal do not occur again. Very often this means dismissals. Their interest is in the source of the problem, in yanking it out at the roots, in the belief that a scandal should damage the innocent as little as possible. They view scandal as a harm not to reputations but to the very purpose of the institution. They tend to be uncuddly, less-lovable individuals: Athanasius, Charles Borromeo, Eliot Ness. Such men are not always necessary; not every corporation needs a “turnaround CEO,” but when they are called for they are indispensable.

For the record: there is no such thing as an unforgivable moral fault.

A final word about charity, and my un-Christian perspective. If the only goods at stake were the self-worth of homosexuals and cozy relations between clergy and laity, charity might suggest a gentler response. But is it reasonable to assume that the only harm gay priests ever do is to themselves, that they are never transmitters of fatal viruses and fatal falsehoods? Do our duties to charity never urge us to ask whether there may be other lives at stake, and, more importantly, other souls? Think of a couple burying their 27-year-old son, urged to “accept his sexuality” at his high school retreat. You may find my metaphors too violent for your taste, but in the real world, who are the priests that are “killing people and breaking things?”