Just as homosexual prelates like the late ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Cardinal Edwin O’Brien hypocritically said that the Church should “not accept seminary candidates who exhibit same-sex attraction,” so too have the biggest supporters of clerical celibacy over the years been closeted homosexuals who in many cases were sexually active, often with teenage boys or other gay clerics and non-clerics. In order to understand the connection between homosexuality and celibacy, it’s necessary to examine this relationship from the historical perspective. Most Catholic clergy in the early Church were married. A negative view of sexuality and a misogynist view of women moved some Church Fathers, including St. Augustine (354-430), to promote clerical celibacy. After cohabitating for fourteen years with a woman with whom he had an illegitimate son, Augustine promoted celibacy as a higher spiritual calling than marriage and recommended sexual abstinence for married couples. Based on his writings, some were led to believe that Augustine might have been bi-sexual. In addition to addressing homoerotic friendships in Books Two and Three of Confessions, Augustine in De Genesi ad litteram wrote, “How much more agreeable for companionship in a life shared together would be two male friends rather than a man and a woman.” In that same work (9.5.9), Augustine wrote, “If woman is not given to man for help in bearing children, for what help could she be?” While priests in religious orders like the Benedictines did not marry for practical habitation reasons, most diocesan clergy who did not live in religious communities were married. In the 8th century, St. Boniface reported to the pope that in Germany, almost no bishop or priest was celibate. In the 9th century, documents from France showed that the majority of priests there were married. Unlike some popes who were widowers when they became pope, Adrian II was married to Stephania with whom he had a daughter when he was elected pope. During his pontificate from 867 to 872, he and Stephania resided together in the Lateran Palace. When Peter Damien (1007-1072), a Benedictine monk and cardinal, wrote The Book of Gomorrah in 1051, most clerical homosexual behavior was occurring in monastic communities involving priests and brothers, as most diocesan priests were married. However, under Pope Leo IX (1049-1054), “papal policy shifted toward prohibiting priests from living with their wives, which was defined as an act of fornication," writes Jennifer Thibodeaux in her book The Manly Priest: Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in the Medieval Period. Leo, who favored rehabilitation over excommunication as suggested by Damien for clerical homosexual misconduct, ordered abandoned clerical wives to be made into slaves (ancillae) of the Lateran palace. In 1055, a Lisieux council took the first steps in Normandy to separate clerics from their wives, banning clerics in major orders from living at home with women. "Thus, the earliest Roman efforts at enforcing clerical celibacy were the literal, physical separation of men from their wives, presumably to project an image of the chaste body," notes Thibodeaux. It was around this same time, in 1054, that Christianity split between the Orthodox in the East and the (Roman) Catholics in the West. Unlike the Orthodox Church, which never abandoned the practice of allowing diocesan priests to marry, the Roman Catholic popes, most of whom were religious clerics who never lived alone like diocesan priests, imposed mandatory celibacy on diocesan priests around the beginning of the twelfth century. While the sexual orientation of the popes who mandated celibacy is unknown, we do know that celibacy, both then and today, discouraged heterosexual vocations while it provided closeted homosexuals with a comfortable and respectable place to live and work. While there may have been popes, bishops, and priests who were capable of living perpetual celibate lives, most heterosexual and homosexual diocesan and religious clerics have found themselves incapable of always observing their promise of celibacy or vow of chastity, as the promiscuous lives of most of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century popes reveal. Pope Paul II (1464-1471) died while being sodomized by a page; Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484) was known to be a "lover of boys and sodomites;" Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) had illegitimate children with two women; Pope Julius II (1503-1513) had three illegitimate daughters; Pope Leo X (1513-1521) suffered from an anal fistula as the result of too much anal sex; Pope Paul III (1534-49) fathered four illegitimate children; Pope Julius III (1440-1555) shared his bed with 15-year-old boy whom he made a cardinal at the age of 17; and Pope Gregory XIII (1572-1585) had a son while he was studying for the priesthood. During the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648), some members of the Orthodox Church reunited with the Roman Catholic Church on the condition that they would be allowed to preserve their Eastern Rite traditions, including a married clergy, in keeping with terms set forth in the Union of Brest (1595-1596) and the Union of Uzhhorod (1646). These Eastern Catholic Churches (e.g., Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Belarusian, etc.) were born out of the failure of the councils of Lyons (1274) and Florence (1439-1445) to heal the Great Schism of 1054 between the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople. In the late 19th century, owing to economic hardship, political strife, and the desire for a better life, many Eastern Rite Catholics immigrated to the United States, accompanied by their married clergy. Most Roman Catholic bishops of questionable sexual orientation at that time were of Irish descent who were not very sensitive to the religious needs and cultural differences of immigrants from non-English speaking countries. St. Paul Bishop John Ireland and other Irish-born prelates were instrumental in getting the Vatican in 1907 to promulgate an apostolic letter, Ea Semper, and a papal decree, Cum Data Fuerit in 1929, which unilaterally altered the Unions of Brest and Uzhhorod by imposing certain restrictions, including the provision that no new married priests were to be ordained in America or to be sent to America. This linked story of Greek Catholic Father Joseph Mihaly, who converted to the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Church, illustrates what happened when married Eastern Rite Greek Catholic priests were given the choice of either returning to their native lands in Eastern Europe or getting jobs as miners, steelworkers, or farmers. Mihaly and most married priests chose neither of these options, but instead chose to return to Orthodoxy. Hence, the imposition of mandatory celibacy resulted in many conversions to the Orthodox Church in America, which claimed that by 1916, the Eastern Catholic Churches had lost 163 Uniate parishes, with over 100,000 faithful converting to the Russian missionary diocese. Just as the adoption of mandatory celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church led over time to the ordination of countless closeted homosexuals, so too did the imposition of clerical celibacy on Eastern Rite priests in the diaspora lead to the ordination of innumerable homosexuals, many of whom were reported for abusing boys and young men like their Roman Catholic counterparts. When a former seminarian was propositioned by a homosexual Ukrainian priest who is currently being sued for abuse, the survivor, who had almost committed suicide, was told by the predator priest that having gay sex was no problem because he knew a Ukrainian bishop who was also sexually involved with another priest. In 2014, when the Vatican lifted its unjust ban on the ordination of married men to the priesthood in Eastern Rite Catholic churches outside their traditional territories, it resulted in an increase in vocations. Parishes that could have been closed, owing to a shortage of celibate priests, are now being pastored by married Eastern Rite clergy. Unlike a Roman Catholic enlisted sailor I recommended who entered a seminary only to leave six months later after constantly being hit on by gay seminarians, a naval officer who attended my daily masses at the same base contacted me recently to inform me that after marrying and having ten children, he was ordained in 2016 and is now the pastor of a Melkite Greek Catholic Church in Atlanta. A Ukrainian friend from Philadelphia who left the seminary in Rome because he felt he could not lead a celibate life in the United States, married in Belgium, and was ordained a deacon. He was later ordained a priest in Ukraine and is now ministering in Canada. He is supportive of my pro-family writings as the head of Ukraine’s Easter Rite Catholic Church rejected the Vatican document on same-sex marriages. While five of six Roman Catholic churches have closed in the Cambria City section of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, the one Greek Catholic Church there did not close when the elderly pastor retired, but is now thriving under the pastoral leadership of a young married Byzantine Catholic priest. That young priest may not be aware of the fact that, in the 1950s, a former pastor of the neighboring Roman Catholic Church got his housekeeper pregnant and raised their daughter in the rectory while the Byzantine Catholic pastor was forbidden to marry. The Roman Catholic pastor, his housekeeper, and his daughter are all buried together in a mausoleum in the local cemetery. Most cases of sexual misconduct on the part of U.S.-born Roman Catholic priests today involve the sexual predation of teenage boys or consensual sex with other gay men. Roman Catholics will continue to be scandalized and ministered to by closeted gay priests like La Crosse Grindr Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, Springfield Father Peter Harman, Raleigh Grindr Father Clemente Guerrero-Olvera, Santa Fe Father Steve Rosera, and others until the Roman Catholic Church follows the lead of Eastern Rite Catholic Churches that ordains both married men and single men who promise celibacy. Catholics who view a married clergy as a threat to celibate clergy need to contemplate that not more than half of all priests are practicing celibacy at any given moment in time, and no more than 2% of priests admit to having observed celibacy throughout their entire lives. Is the Church setting some seminarians up for failure by leading them to believe that going through an ordination ceremony will rid them of sexual feelings and their basic need to love and be loved? If a spouse fails to remember his or her wedding anniversary, or if he or she doesn't give the other partner a birthday or Christmas present, how might the other spouse feel? When some Catholics argue that priests should not be allowed to marry and extol “the gift of celibacy,” one cannot help but ask, “What gifts did you give your ‘Father’ this past year for his birthday, for the anniversary of his ordination, and for Christmas?” If priests are lonely, if they do not keep their vows of celibacy, or if they leave to marry, might it be because parishioners don’t have a clue how celibacy is “a two-way street,” and how they often are not returning their priest’s love? The percentage of gay clergy and reports of clerical sexual predation and homosexual misconduct will continue to plague the Roman Catholic Church, unlike the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches, as long as celibacy is mandated for diocesan priests, thus providing a comfortable closet for gay bishops, priests, and seminarians in which to hide. This Substack column is free. If you find it informative, please recommend it to others and support it by contributing to the “Save Our Seminarians” Fund. Gene Thomas Gomulka is a sexual abuse victims’ advocate, investigative reporter, and screenwriter. A former Navy (O6) Captain/Chaplain, seminary instructor, and diocesan Respect Life Director, Gomulka was ordained a priest for the Altoona-Johnstown diocese and later made a Prelate of Honor (Monsignor) by St. John Paul II. Email him at msgr.investigations@gmail.com |
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