The Vatican recently issued a set of diocesan guidelines with the idea that they may curb the astronomically expensive settlement of sexually related lawsuits involving the clergy in future. It is most unfortunate that this issue has created some confusion as to what the problem actually was and has, inevitably, raised the hackles of the gay community. This is because the guidelines employed terminology that included homosexual priests, homosexual Catholics and homosexuals in general in equal measure, underlining, once again, the Vatican belief in the intrinsic disorder of homosexuality sugared by the rider that all homosexuals must be treated with respect etc.
To make things worse, the sort of tests on how successfully the homosexual seminarian has managed to suppress his sexuality is humiliating in the extreme. The document may be summed up as a knee-jerk reaction to the paedophile scandals that have rocked the Church, the pressure being put on it to reintroduce marriage within the ranks of the clergy and the Church's inability to keep up with secular legislation especially what seems to be the Church's biggest nightmare, gay marriage.
It is terribly incorrect to confuse paedophilia with homosexuality. They are different issues. We do not live in a protected world anymore and today the average adult knows that paedophilia is an affliction that affects both gay and straight people equally. Paedophilia is a heinous crime; a criminal offence and there is no excuse for it. There are straight paedophiles as anyone who has ever read Nabokov's Lolita will surely know and gay ones too as anyone who has read Mann's Death in Venice will attest. None of the lawsuits involved homosexual priests having sexual relations with consenting adults of the same sex, which speaks volumes.
The problem with the Vatican is that it has lost literally billions of dollars, sacked cardinals and bishops and closed down dioceses as more and more former underage victims come forward and win lawsuit after lawsuit. The US has been affected worst of all. What has happened in the last 30 years is that, although the bishops knew all about the goings-on, most of them chose to either obfuscate the issue or play the proverbial ostrich with the result that we have reached a stage in the Church's history wherein those who imagine that they have a vocation will think it over 129 times before daring to do anything about it.
Should the would-be priest be heterosexual, he would have to be prepared to sacrifice his sexuality for the rest of his life. He would have to, for the love of God and his neighbour, be ready to suppress and annihilate every desire that is integral to each and every human being. The solace of marriage is forever denied to him. The miracle of having children and raising them is a joy and sorrow that he will have to forego; all this while being intimately involved in the marital problems of other people; all this while watching other people's children grow up.
A priest's life can be very lonely and, unless his faith is rock solid, can lead to despair. The priest is with us from the cradle to the grave and yet he is extraneous. This is a sacrifice that fewer and fewer heterosexual men wish to make. Let's face it. A career in the Church is just as much of a rat race as any other. Therefore, unless the would-be heterosexual priest is a living saint or, like the priests of Cybele in classical times, is willing to castrate himself, life within the Church requires a total sense of denial, commitment and penance.
Yes, there are, luckily for us, men who are prepared to undergo this sort of life; individuals whose faith is so strong that they are able to withstand the legendary Temptations of St Anthony and live a saintly chaste life. But they are a minority. The strangest thing is that the Church wishes for your lay Catholic homosexual to live in exactly the same way without the blessing of ordination! It also has ordered proof that homosexual seminarians have suppressed their natural instincts while I do not imagine that heterosexual seminarians have to go through the same humiliations. Such paranoia is incredible.
We have, during the last 30 odd years, witnessed the Church's veil of mystique and inviolability being torn away and no echelon of its hierarchy has been left unscathed. It has cost the Church millions of dollars but even worse it has opened a can of worms that has wreaked untold damage to its reputation. Despite this, the Catholic Church still refuses to countenance the reintroduction of a married priesthood and, while praying for vocations that dwindle annually, has put yet more deterrents in the path of any young man who may be remotely interested in priestly life. I will not cite examples from Church history as I will definitely be accused of raking up mud and my space is perforce limited, so anyone interested can do so by using one's ever so useful and efficient internet to read all about it and judge for oneself.
Meanwhile, the Church, true to form, has decided to clamp down on the homosexual world - I say world because statistically it is one in five - and make it their scapegoat. The situation put very simply involves two types of priests.
The first is the one who with every good intention and because he was brought up in a Catholic environment decided to view his homosexuality as a cross to lay upon the altar of his Faith. Many homosexual priests throughout history have led very happy, saintly and successful lives; as many, I am sure, as the heterosexual ones who made the same decision for the same reasons. There are others, however, who have viewed the Church as a means of escape from the once odious and emarginated life that homosexuals once had to lead within a nominally heterosexual western society; in other words, becoming a priest was a mere convenience if not a bolthole. Because we live in more enlightened times, there is now no pressing need to hide one's homosexuality under a cassock, ergo the sanctuary once offered to homosexuals within the Church is superannuated.
We live on an island wherein, mercifully, the Catholic Church and its ministers are still viewed with love and respect. Sexual scandal had indeed rocked its foundations a couple of years ago but all the hue and cry had, till now, died down again. To a paedophile priest, whether gay or straight, having sexual relations with a boy is so much easier than with a girl. Priests teach in boys' schools, they have altar boys at their beck and call, they run recreation centres for boys and, up to the time when the scandals hit the headlines, being taken out on some hike or picnic by a priest was something pretty normal and parents in fact not only did not bat an eyelid but were happy that their boys were being looked after by a responsible priest. Boys are simply far more available than girls and to a paedophile "making do" with a boy would be as easy as falling off a log.
As not all priests are paedophiles, far from it, the innocent priests who may be either non-practising hetero- or homo- sexuals but definitely not paedophiles, are now suffering with the guilty and, even in Malta, after the goings on in Church institutions for boys saw the light of day, parents, quite rightly, will never be so trusting again.
The Church has pronounced itself to be out of synch with reality. Because this proclamation is nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction, the Church has further narrowed its doors to both homosexual and heterosexual men who genuinely wish to become priests for all the right reasons. Both must sacrifice their sexuality in equal measure after all. By denying the re-establishment of married priests and clamping down on the usual scapegoats with a ferocity that would make Torquemada blush, the Catholic Church is not going to solve either of its grave problems, lack of vocations and paedophilia. In fact, it will simply make them worse.
kzt@onvol.net