On Richard Sipe's website titled
Celibacy/Sex/Catholic Church, I came upon an intriguing essay titled "Are American Bishops Gay?"
The short answer is yes, some are.
I am pursuing this discussion in the spirit of contemplative transformation espoused by Fr. Thomas Keating who challenges us to confront the biases that keep us from facing truth when we fail to ask penetrating questions: “Are you so enamored with your religion that you have a naïve loyalty that cannot see the real faults that are present in a particular faith community? Do you sweep under the rug embarrassing situations and bow to the security or esteem needs of the community?”1
Who is Richard Sipe?
A.W. RICHARD SIPE is a Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselor who earlier spent 18 years as a Benedictine monk and priest. He was trained specifically to deal with the mental health problems of Roman Catholic Priests. In the process of training and therapy, he conducted a 25-year ethnographic study of the celibate/sexual behavior of that population. His study, published in 1990, is now considered a classic. Sipe is known internationally and has participated in 12 documentaries on celibacy and priest sexual abuse aired by HBO, BBC, and other networks in the United States, United Kingdom, and France. He has been widely interviewed by media including CNN, ABC, NBC, CNBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, People magazine, Newsweek and USA Today.
There's more biographical information at Sipe's website, including what I presume is a picture of him at the Vatican with John Paul II.
Sipe goes on:
Why start a dialogue about human sexuality with identifying gay bishops?
At first glance this focus may seem prickly, provocative and contentious. Not true. Rather this is an effort to define a sexual reality and not celibate failure.
Denial of the reality that clergy, bishops included, have some sexual orientation—whatever it may be—is destructive and forms a linchpin keeping a diseased process in place. Also in treating disease—in this case religious hypocrisy—one starts first to address the symptom. A boil can be an ugly and painful sign of a blood disorder; it has to be treated locally and systemically. The hypocrisy of some American bishops, their arrogance and duplicity patently manifested in their dealings with the victims of abuse by clergy, their pronouncements about the “intrinsic disorders” and “intrinsic evil” of masturbation, birth control and the whole host sexual behaviors common to Christian men and women cry to the heavens for an honest accounting and open discussion. Bishops need to be honest about sexuality—even their own. Painful as it might be the boil must be lanced. That is a start to treatment and cure.
....
Am I proposing here an “outing” of gay bishops? No!
I am suggesting that the reality of bishops‟ sexual orientation/behavior and the need to hide it is a significant element in clerical culture and structure that keeps us from facing basic facts about how that culture operates and affects millions of people. (My emphasis)
Since I left the Roman Catholic Church 15 years ago over the child abuse and cover-up in my diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, I've thought much about the reasons for the abuse and cover-up, and, although I'm no expert, I'm convinced that forced celibacy as a condition for ordination in the RCC is the source of at least some of the abusive behavior. Perhaps men predisposed to be child-abusers made their way through the ordination screening process, but it seems to me that being taught to live one's life in denial of one's own sexuality, whether oriented to straight, or gay, or somewhere in between, could, in some instances, lead to aberrant behavior of several varieties, including abuse of children, even if one was not originally predisposed to such behavior. A godly call to celibacy is one thing, but forced celibacy is a whole other matter.
To leave my church of almost 60 years was no easy matter, but I will say that if I had not left back then, by now I would be out of the RCC for other reasons. By no means am I saying that everyone should leave the RCC. I have many friends who are Roman Catholic, and I admire my friends who stay in the church and fight the good fight for change. When I left, I promised myself that I would not be a bitter ex-Catholic, and I believe that I've succeeded in that endeavor more than I have failed.
Regarding the cover-up, I saw the probable cause of the bishops circling the wagons and moving quickly into denial as the default response as a desire to protect the church as an institution, and in their skewed moral assessment, it was more important to protect the institution, than to protect the children.
Perhaps I'm naive, but never once did I think of the gay men amongst the bishops, probably not all of whom were celibate, having to protect themselves from being found out, as another reason to deploy the policy of cover-up. The massive scale of the hypocrisy within the Roman Catholic Church in its failure to acknowledge the numbers of priests within its own clergy population who do not practice celibacy is stunning. As the news of the scandal broke, I began to say of the priests, "For God's sake, do what you have to do, but find a consenting adult, and leave the children alone!"
Let's start where the hierarchy has long staked out its sexual concerns—specifically about homosexuality even before the term came into common parlance in the 1850s. Same sex orientation and behaviors remain a perennial and major concern of Vatican officials both concerning laymen and within the clerical culture.
When James Hickey, later cardinal of Washington D.C. was rector of the Pontifical North American Theological College in Rome, a sign posted on a bulletin board in the college stated “Overt homosexuality will not be tolerated in this seminary.” A priest from Louisiana took a photo of the bulletin board when it appeared.
Once again, it's the hypocrisy that is so very disturbing. Sipe cites Andrew Greeley's novel,
The Cardinal Sins, which I read back in the day:
Father Andrew Greeley outlined the clerical celibate/sexual system most elegantly and accurately in his novel The Cardinal Sins. Struggles and failures around power and celibacy are personified in two boyhood friends who become priests. Pat Donahue is a prototype of the clerical sociopath who even violates a classmate and sneaks dates with girls while in the seminary. As he ascends the clerical ladder to become a cardinal he has sexual encounters—some sadistic—with women, fathers a child, and is dominated by bi-sexual passion that is equaled only by his limitless ambition and ecclesiastical savoir-faire. Kevin Brennan the faithful celibate friend and fellow priest repeatedly covers up for Donahue and saves him and the Church from scandal.
Although Greeley could hardly have intended it at the time of writing, the book remains a paradigm of the clerical culture and the celibate/sexual structure—homosexual Vatican Monsignori and all—that constitutes clerical society. Greeley‟s “novel of grace” has the status and force of a parable: clerics collude to cover clergy malfeasance to preserve the Church from scandal. The sexual abuse crisis in the U.S. (and Ireland) spotlights that paradigm with glaring clarity.
The essay was an eye-opener for me, and I'm probably quoting too many of Richard Sipe's words, but I hope that some of you will read the essay. It's 16 pages in a pdf file, but worth taking the time.
As I look at the leadership in the Roman Catholic Church today, I see no move towards openness or an acknowledgement of the reality of the state of the RCC clergy. But the RCC is not simply the hierarchy. The church is the people and the priests who go about their business each day doing the Lord's work and therein lies my hope for the church in which I spent so many years of my life.
I'll end on a humorous note with one more quote from Sipe:
A longtime religion reporter/editor for a prominent daily remarked one time during an interview that he was struck by “all the beautiful young priests” who were in attendance to bishops he had interviewed during his career. Similar innuendoes and jokes are circulated among the Rome Press Corps about a young priest-secretary who attends Pope Benedict XVI. The pope's red Gucci pumps and his obvious predilection for fashionable miters and robes (in addition to his long assault on the "intrinsically disordered" population) do nothing to establish a secure masculine image.
Thanks to John for pointing me to Richard Sipe's writing.
