Gay Clergy

I saw an article in the TimesOnline today about an interview of The Bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, now visiting in the UK. The article deals mostly with the schism in the Anglican Communion and with gay clergy. Here's a little of the article below ....

The Bishop of New Hampshire in the US, the Right Rev Gene Robinson, who is divorced and lives openly in partnership with a gay man, said he found it "mystifying" that the mother church of the Anglican Communion was unable to be honest about the number of gay clergy in its ranks ..... Speaking in an interview in London, Bishop Gene said: "I have met so many gay partnered clergy here and it is so troubling to hear them tell me that their bishop comes to their house for dinner, knows fully about their relationship, is wonderfully supportive but has also said if this ever becomes public then I’m your worst enemy. It’s a terrible way to live your life and I think it’s a terrible way to be a church." ......

Not being Anglican or Episcopalian, I probably shouldn't comment on the situation, but of course we in the Catholic Church had our own frisson over the subject of gay clergy. I thought I'd post bits of a fcouple of things from 2005 when the Vatican document on homosexuality in the priesthood was released, articles that touch on elements raised in the Robinson interview above .... one article by the former head of the Dominican Order, Timothy Radcliffe OP, and an open letter written by Catholic priest and theologian, James Alison ...

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Can Gays Be Preists? by Timothy Radcliffe, in The Tablet, November 26, 2005 .....

TWO WEEKS AGO I was in Nova Scotia, giving a retreat for the bishops and priests of eastern Canada. A priest sent up a piece of paper with a question that he was too shy to ask publicly: “Will this document on the admission of gays to the priesthood mean that I am not welcome anymore? Does it mean that people like me are second-class priests?” I have heard this same question, in one form or another, from priests all over the world. The forthcoming Vatican document on homosexuality and the priesthood (see page 40) is the focus of intense anxiety ..... a vocation is a call from God. It is true that, as the document says, it is “received through the Church, in the Church and for the service of the Church”, but it is God who calls. Having worked with bishops and priests, diocesan and religious, all over the world, I have no doubt that God does call homosexuals to the priesthood, and they are among the most dedicated and impressive priests I have met. So no priest who is convinced of his vocation should feel that this document classifies him as a defective priest. And we may presume that God will continue to call both homosexuals and heterosexuals to the priesthood because the Church needs the gifts of both .....

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And this by James Alison - Letter of response to friends in the aftermath of the Vatican Instruction of 29 November 2005 .........

The instruction is clear, straightforward and logical ..... that teaching is here presented in the most muted form I have seen it in a recent Roman document. It is almost as if some of the many higher authorities which have reviewed this document before allowing this particular dicastery to publish it might be saying something rather like this:

”Look, we know that there are a lot of us, priests, Bishops, Cardinals, seminarians, seminary teachers, and religious superiors who are gay; and there are many of us, whether straight or gay, who don’t in fact buy the line that being gay is an objective disorder. We know that there are many of us who regard being gay as no more pathological than being left-handed. Yet the fact remains that the current ordinary teaching is that being gay is more akin to a personality disorder than to left-handedness. There are improper ways of dealing with the disjunction between that widely held, if rarely expressed, opinion and the current teaching, and there is a proper way. We want to close off one of the improper ways of dealing with this in the hopes that we can all move together toward finding the proper way.

The improper way is to pretend in public that you go along with the teaching while in fact, and in your private life, you do not. The result of going down this route has been many of us encouraging people to join the seminary and priesthood just so long as they become inducted into playing the sort of game that too many of us have been playing for too long. That is, letting it be perfectly clear off the record that being gay is fine, just so long as we don’t say in public that we’re gay, and just so long as we agree not to challenge in public the teaching that being gay is an objective disorder.

Well, treating people in this way is to do something terrible to them: it makes them live a lie as a condition for becoming a minister of the Gospel. And it is to do something terrible to the people who we are supposed to be serving: it creates a clerical caste which has its own, tolerant rules and structures for life within the club, the price for whose maintenance is that its gay members agree not to challenge those who are publicly harsh and intolerant about matters gay whenever these surface in the public arena. In other words, the Catechism teaching is for the plebs, while we have our own hidden teaching, our own safe space, for the elite.

Even a cursory acquaintance with the Gospel reveals that if this is how we have been living, then we should fear for our salvation, and we should be deeply penitent for having gone along with and contributed to this mess. So let us please close down this culture of dishonesty and agree only to accept candidates and form them in the light of the current teaching of the Church rather than in the light of what we think the current teaching of the Church ought to be, but are not brave enough to say so" .....

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