Open Letter to California's Priests

I was out at the gay bar the other night with a handful of priests.  We were having drinks and dinner.  One of them said to me, “The only problem with your book was, I found a factual error.”

I shrank from this priest as if he had identified a black mark on my soul.  I tried to forestall the complaint: “I know, I know,” I said, “I skipped the papacy of poor Paul VI, and went straight on to JPI.  I mixed up O’Neill and McNeill in successive lines (those Irish all sound alike), etc., etc. Mea culpa.  Please forgive me.”

            “No, no, no,” the priest said.  “That’s not what I’m talking about.  It’s your estimate of the number of priests that are gay.  You wrote that it’s 30-60%.”

            “Yeah,” I said, “that’s from Donald Cozzens book The Changing Face of the Priesthood.  It may be on the high side.”

            “No, that’s what I’m saying,” the priest replied, now animated.  “That’s the mistake.  At least in Boston, my experience is, well, I don’t know a single priest that isn’t gay!  I’d put it at 100%!”

            Another priest agreed and chimed in wistfully, “Wouldn’t it solve a lot of problems if they all just came out at once, so we could put this problem behind us, and get on with it, get on with the Gospel teaching and leave this homophobia stuff behind?”

            Amen, I thought.  If only.  Think about it:  California’s Roman Catholic prelates have recently put money and political muscle behind the drive to ban same-sex marriage through Question 8. One group of men has the power to blunt that effort singlehandedly: the gay priests. 

What if we all shouted and cajoled and encouraged:

California clergy, come out of the closet – to your parishes, to yourselves, and to your friends.  Now’s the time.  The Vatican’s Secretary of State Cardinal Bertone issued a statement confirming that the 2005 ban on gay seminarians applied to all candidates to the priesthood, whether in orders or dioceses.  If the prospect of a same-sex marriage ban were not enough to convince you, here’s another reason to stand up proudly as the wonderful priests you are -- and as living witness to the misguidedness of Vatican policy.

You will not be alone.  In the early 1970s, Tom Brokaw interviewed Father John J. McNeill, a Jesuit, on NBC. “Are you gay?” Brokaw asked. McNeill acknowledged that he was. This admission kick-started a tradition of clerical coming out:

-- 1987: Robert L. Arpin announced from the pulpit that he was gay and had AIDS.

-- 1997: Martin Kurylowicz came out to his parish in a newsletter and at Holy Thursday services. His boss, the bishop of the Grand Rapids diocese, supported him.

-- 2002: William Hart McNichols of Taos, New Mexico came out in a Time magazine article about closeted priests.

-- 2004: Fred Daley, from the Diocese of Syracuse, announced publicly that he was gay after becoming fed up with the Vatican’s attempt to scapegoat gay priests for the scandal. His parish gave him a standing ovation.

-- 2005: Rich Danyluk came out to his parish. He later explained, “There's a passage in Scripture that God said to Jesus, ‘You're my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased.’  I believe God says that to every male, and he says ‘You're my beloved daughter’ to every woman. Finally, that sunk into me, that I don't need a priest or a bishop or a pope to tell me who I am.”

-- 2005: a Jesuit retreat director from Bloomfield Hills Michigan, Thomas J. O’Brien, came out in the Detroit Free Press in response to the ban on gay priests, writing “I am coming out as a gay, chaste Jesuit priest because it hurts too much not to.”

-- 2006: Jim Morrison came out to his Louisiana parish and bishop as a celibate gay man. He said he was not looking for approval, but only trying to be more true to himself, his parish, and his God.

-- 2007: Thomas J. Brennan came out to a packed Mass at Saint Joseph’s University.

-- 2008: Father Paul Edward Murray confirmed his past public coming out with a book called “Life in Paradox: The Story of a Gay Catholic Priest”

Fear is no excuse; the dioceses cannot discipline all of you without decimating their ranks and thereby denying the sacraments to the faithful.

California priests, be a witness to truth.  Your example of being both holy and gay makes it impossible for the Church hierarchy and other equality opponents to thunder about purportedly deviant or disordered homosexual lifestyles -- and hard for you parishioners to internalize such messages, especially when they get to the ballot box in November.

            Why don’t we try it now?  Begin with your parish priest. Do it with love.