AIDS has quietly caused the deaths of hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in the United States, although other causes may be listed on some of their death certificates, the Kansas City Star reported today. The newspaper said its examination of death certificates and interviews with experts indicates several hundred priests have died of AIDS-related illnesses since the mid-1980s. The death rate of priests from AIDS is at least four times that of the general population, the newspaper said. Kansas City Bishop Raymond Boland says the AIDS deaths show that priests are human.

Astonishing, when you think about it. The paragraph above comes from an Associated Press report on a series of newspaper articles by Judy L. Thomas that appeared in January of 2000. It is too much to say Catholics were “rocked” by the attendant media hype—the scandal threshold has been raised pretty high in recent years—but among the laity the articles occasioned, if not a gasp, at least a general sigh of exasperation. From almost all sides one heard the complaint “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Why not indeed.

A large part of the answer is implicit in the remarkable response to the situation tendered by Bishop Boland. To aver that a priest shows he is human by dying of AIDS is to say either that yielding to this sort of temptation is something that might happen to any normal person or that it is somehow natural to our human state to engage in acts of passive consensual sodomy, from which the resultant infection takes its predictable course. Few Catholics who are not in Holy Orders would share this view of human nature. In reality, the fact that priests die of AIDS proves that they commit sin, by which they show not that they are more genuinely human but that they act in a sub-human manner; sub-human not in any special sense, but in the ordinary sense in which each of us falls short of his true human dignity by sinning, whatever our sin may be.

But Bishop Boland, like many of his brethren, is unwilling to concede any moral component to the phenomenon. “I would never ask a priest how he got [AIDS],” he told Thomas, “just like nobody asked me two years ago how I got cancer of the colon. But I would provide for him. I would not write him off and say, ‘Because you’ve got AIDS and because there are doubts about how one can acquire it, therefore you’re not a good priest.’” Well, let’s take the case of a three-year-old girl brought into the emergency room with a broken jaw and cigarette burns on her rib cage. Suppose the hospital personnel said, “Look, there’s more than one way to pick up these injuries, and the girl’s medical treatment will be the same whatever their cause, so there’s no point in asking how she got them.” Most of us would see such a response as a culpably willful refusal to face up to a grim reality. By the same token, when we are urged to pretend that there is room for doubt as to how most priests contract AIDS, we can be sure that our gaze is being intentionally diverted from the ugly and indisputable facts: a disproportionately high percentage of priests is gay; a disproportionately high percentage of gay priests routinely engages in sodomy; this sodomy is frequently ignored, often tolerated, and sometimes abetted by bishops and superiors.

A widespread problem?
Just how widespread is homosexuality among priests and bishops? For obvious reasons, no reliable statistics are available. The percentage is vigorously disputed, of course, but one indication of the scope of the problem is that those who argue for the lowest estimate insist that the number of gays in the clergy is no higher than that of the gay population in society at large—as if this were not on its own showing evidence of a profound crisis. Gay priests themselves—who, though admittedly partisan, admittedly also have unique access to the facts—commonly assure us that they are legion within the priesthood in general and well-represented even among bishops. Obviously, they have an interest in exaggerating their numbers—for both psychological and political reasons. But the Kansas City Star series mentioned above notes that, of 26 novices who entered the Missouri Province of the Jesuit order in 1967 and 1968, only seven were eventually ordained priests. Of these seven, three have (to date) died of AIDS, and a fourth is an openly gay priest now working as an artist in New York. The priest-artist deplored the fact, not that his fellow Jesuits engaged in homosexual relations, but that they did not take “safe-sex” precautions even after the facts about HIV transmission became known. In this case, four of seven priests in a discrete sample are known to have been actively homosexual. What can we extrapolate from this data about the remaining three men, or about the American priesthood in general? Ten years ago the liberal National Catholic Reporter cited this example as typical:

Father Smith (not his real name) is a Jesuit priest working in a Philadelphia parish in one of the older parts of the city. He is a closeted gay priest and does not want his name used. . . . “In my worst moments,” he said, “I fear I will have been a collaborator in supporting an institution that oppresses gay people. . . .” He said he became a Jesuit after falling in love with an older, 40-year old Jesuit priest. Smith was 20 then and studying at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia. “As a Catholic priest, I know there would be no church without gay people. . . . I assume priests are gay until proven otherwise.”

Kill [Ratzinger]? Pray for him? Why not just f—- him??? Any volunteers — ugh!!! ... I do not see how he can possibly do this — but . . . If he does, lemme repeat my statement earlier — that I will cause lotsa s—- for him and the Vatican. And that is a promise. MY intention would be simply to ask the question what he intends doing with those priests, bishops (possibly “like me”) and cardinals . . . who are gay. That should cause s—- enough. Be assured dear reverend gentlemen, I shall let you know the day any such outrageous letter reaches the desks of the ordinaries of the world.

Ideology allows the problem to persist
Bishop Cawcutt’s astonishing survivability puts one in mind of President Clinton’s, and to some extent the persistence of the gay priest problem and President Clinton’s immunity to scandal have a common cause: gay clergy in their sphere and Clinton in his own have been indispensable agents in the advancement of the liberal agenda. Like their secular counterparts, Catholic liberals, even where they do not positively applaud the sexual recreations of gay priests, are willing to overlook the resultant embarrassment in order that a more important end may be served—in order, that is, that gays may remain as active members in the Church to assist them in their project of replacing ecclesial authority with personal experience as the norm determinative of authentic faith.

The leadership of the liberal movement in the Catholic Church today is still dominated by former priests, brothers, and seminarians who abandoned their vocations in the 1960s and 70s. Most of these left to marry, and for them contraception remains the touchstone issue. Of their companions in dissent who stayed behind in the priesthood, a disproportionately high number are gay, and even liberal writers have commented on the “lavenderization of the left” that characterizes the clerical wing of their movement. A review of a recent book on the priesthood by the National Catholic Reporter’s Tom Roberts typifies the position—uneasily held, nervously expressed—of the non-gay progressive:

“Considering Orientation” is the chapter of The Changing Face of the Priesthood that deals with the increasingly disproportionate number of homosexuals in the Roman Catholic priesthood and the one that leads the author, Fr. Donald B. Cozzens, to ask if the priesthood is on its way to becoming a “gay profession.” It is a devilishly difficult question to ask, first because almost no one in the hierarchical ranks wants anything to do with it, and because one can only approach it through a minefield planted wide with homophobes, right-wing zealots who see homosexual clergy as a particularly noxious manifestation of a liberal agenda, and the church’s teaching that the homosexual orientation is “objectively disordered.”

The “minefield” that terrifies Roberts involves not the explosive potential of error but the explosive potential of truth. What is unthinkable, what seems to be psychologically impossible to concede, is that there is an aspect of post-conciliar controversy in which the conservatives might have been right after all. In the same vein, whereas the National Catholic Reporter via Jason Berry’s articles was among the first publications to broach the subject of clerical sexual abuse, the same paper remains bewilderingly doctrinaire in its refusal to question the dogma that the preponderance of male victims is entirely unrelated to priestly homosexuality. Though progressives lampoon the orthodox as cowards who shut their eyes and cover their ears while shouting the party line, in this arena there is little doubt as to who is asking the disconcerting questions and who wants to change the subject. The Kansas City Star series cites an example that is as telling as it is typical; the subject is pre-seminary HIV testing.

One religious order that doesn’t require the test is the Society of the Precious Blood. The Rev. Mark Miller, provincial director of the Kansas City province, said the testing raises issues that he does not wish to address. “When you ask a question, you need to know why you are asking it,” Miller said. “The answers that would come up put it in a category where we don’t want to go.”

Homosexuality is not treated as a problem
For all that, the number of priests dead of AIDS has forced everyone, even gay clergy themselves, to admit that something is not right. Here too, however, the nature of the crisis as well as its solution has been brought to the public attention by the secular media and presented solely in its secular aspects. What is disappointing, if not surprising, is the extent to which bishops and religious superiors have adopted the secular mindset and washed their hands of their moral responsibilities, in effect allowing the poachers to appoint themselves gamekeepers. A parade example is the case of Father Michael Peterson, founder of the Saint Luke Institute which specializes in therapy for priests with sexual disorders. Peterson himself died of AIDS in 1987, a circumstance which not only failed to destroy the credibility of his motives or to delegitimize his therapeutic techniques, but which earned him almost unanimous post-mortem accolades, even from bishops. Examples can be multiplied from the Kansas City Star articles:

In 1986, [Father Dennis] Rausch moved to South Florida and eventually became Catholic chaplain at Florida International University in North Miami. It was there that he began counseling and ministering to people with HIV and AIDS. In February 1989, Rausch decided he should get an HIV test himself. He waited nearly three weeks for the devastating results. “The first year was really difficult,” said Rausch, 47. “I went through anger at myself for being so stupid. You wonder, ‘Am I going to get sick and die? How long am I going to be around? What if the bishop finds out? Is he going to ship me off?’”

The Rev. Thomas Crangle, a Franciscan priest in the Capuchin order in Passaic, N.J., knows what a positive AIDS test can do to a seminarian. When he was vocation director for his province, Crangle said, a man applied for his order, which didn’t require testing, and another order that had mandatory testing. “He came out positive,” Crangle said. “He came to me and he said, ‘That just blows all my dreams.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t blow your dreams. You had a vocation before this, and this does not make you who you are.’”

Mention is seldom, if ever, made of the moral failing on the part of the priest. Sodomy is a mortal sin, and this sin is compounded on the part of the priest because it involves a further violation of his promises of chastity, in addition to the hypocrisy implicit in his acting against his role of moral teacher and helper of souls. Silence on this subject on the part of bishops and religious superiors is baffling to lay Catholics, who naturally wonder whether there is a double standard in operation that censures laypeople but excuses clergy, that censures heterosexual but excuses homosexual vice.

Even rarer than discussion of the moral delinquency of the priest with AIDS is candid acknowledgment of the part played by sexual perversion in contracting the disease, the psychological disorder of the man locked into a compulsive homosexual libido which is marked by an adolescent selfishness and hunger for gratification and an adolescent irresponsibility and lack of control. Men entrusted with institutional authority who are enfeebled by deviant compulsive sexuality cannot help but damage the institution, not only by sexual mischief, but in ways unrelated to sex in which their immaturity, hostility, and irresponsibility lead them to sacrifice the common good to their own agenda. Yet the gamekeepers and their partisans keep alive the pretense that a priest can make the “mistakes” that lead to his death by AIDS while still serving the Church with moral and doctrinal and pastoral integrity, as if the inclination to sodomy were an isolable affliction like measles or a weakness for chocolate.

A case in point concerns Father Thom Savage, S.J., who last year became the first president of an American university, religious or secular, to die of AIDS. Most of the faithful who learned of it winced at the shame that it should be a Catholic, and still more a priest, that earned this distinction. One might have expected official responses similar to those offered when a priest is found dead in a brothel: a low-key statement of regret for the scandal caused, a brief reaffirmation of the priestly duty of chastity, a reminder to pray that God deal mercifully with the departed. Father Edward Kinerk, S.J., is a former superior of the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus and Savage’s successor as president of Rockhurst College. This is how he chose to speak to the issue:

As a Jesuit, I cannot feel anything but pride and gratitude for a meteor that burned itself out in the service of others. On May 10, 1999, God took the gift back. Thom is with God. As Jesuits, we rejoice. He has done what God sent him to do.

Must celibacy be taught?
If it is not already obvious from what has preceded, it should be stated flatly that the word “homophobia” will not be found in the mouth of an honest man. It represents an intellectual fraud perpetrated for devious political motives that will not withstand open examination. A parallel bit of semantic sleight-of-hand is the notion that “sexuality” or “celibate sexuality” needs to be taught to adult men. One of Judy Thomas’s Kansas City Star headlines neatly encapsulates the party line of the gamekeepers: “Seminary taught spirituality, liturgy, and Latin—sexuality was taboo.” Thomas reports that most priests polled by the Star “said the church failed to offer an early and effective sexual education that might have prevented [HIV] infection in the first place.” Though uncritical in its presentation, her series accurately picks-up this drumbeat and relays it in quote after quote.

“Sexuality still needs to be talked about and dealt with,” said the Rev. Dennis Rausch.

“The Jesuits have made a much more concerted effort to educate our men on sexuality and celibacy and what that means,” Fr. Edward Kinerk said.

“When young men go into seminary, they don’t even know what celibacy is,” said Fr. Harry Morrison, a California priest who has AIDS. “A lot of this technical language, these Latin phrases, all you know is there’s something to be afraid of. You don’t even know exactly what it means.”

“How to be celibate and to be gay at the same time, and how to be celibate and heterosexual at the same time, that’s what we were never really taught how to do.” (Bishop Thomas Gumbleton)

There is a sense, of course, in which a normal, well-intentioned seminarian can and should learn from the ascetical tradition of the Church and from non-politicized psychology how to avoid dangers to chastity and how to strengthen his self-mastery so as to stay chaste. Exhortations to modesty in speech and dress and to custody of the eyes are examples of the former; instruction on the dangers of projection and transference in counseling situations are examples of the latter. But everyone familiar with the current reality knows that the “workshops on sexuality” offered to priests and seminarians do not concern themselves with techniques helpful to self-mastery. Rather they take the form of group sharing sessions in which the participants are invited to make peace with their own “sexuality” and urged, much more forcefully, to tolerate those with non-standard appetites. A case in point: the US Jesuits recently approved guidelines for admitting novices that include this characteristic of the ideal candidate: “He has the ability to identify and accept his own sexual orientation and to live comfortably with people of different sexual orientations.” Note that in the discussion of sexual orientation the qualifiers “normal” and “deviant” play no part in the equation. In this context they never do.

The gay priest problem will continue to worsen as long as this code-talk remains the dominant idiom. As long as seminarians are “educated in sexuality” by the Michael Petersons and are warned by their superiors that they must “live comfortably with people of different sexual orientations,” we can be sure that the number of gays will steadily increase in the clergy and the language of moral integrity will be pushed out of the discussion. Quite simply, those entrusted to fix what is broken are broken themselves and are camouflaging their real motives in the fuzzy vocabulary of therapy and pastoral sensitivity. As with every institutional crisis, this one ultimately boils down to the question of accountability. Who recruits the newcomers? Who forms their habits and attitudes? More importantly, who appoints the recruiters and educators? Who will name the problems for what they are and take responsibility for putting them right? The issue of accountability forces us to confront a yet more intimidating crisis, one which is easily misunderstood and which I take up with reluctance, but which must be faced squarely as an unpleasant truth.

Why bishops won’t act
I define as corrupt, in a sociological sense, any institution that has lost the capacity to mend itself on its own initiative and by its own resources, an institution that is unable to uncover and expel its own miscreants. It is in this sense that the principal reason why the action necessary to solve the gay problem won’t be taken is that the episcopacy in the United States is corrupt, and the same is true of the majority of religious orders. It is important to stress that this is a sociological claim, not a moral one.

If we examine any trust-invested agency at any given point in its history, whether that agency be a police force, a military unit, or a religious community, we might find that, say, out of every hundred men, five are scoundrels, five are heroes, and the rest are neither one nor the other: ordinarily upright men who live with a mixture of moral timidity and moral courage. When the institution is healthy, the gutsier few set the overall tone, and the less courageous but tractable majority works along with these men to minimize misbehavior; more importantly, the healthy institution is able to identify its own rotten apples and remove them before the institution itself is enfeebled. However, when an institution becomes corrupt, its guiding spirit mysteriously shifts away from the morally intrepid few, and with that shift the institution becomes more interested in protecting itself against outside critics than in tackling the problem members who subvert its mission. For example, when we say a certain police force is corrupt, we don’t usually mean that every policeman is on the take—perhaps only five out of a hundred actually accept bribes. Rather we mean that this police force can no longer diagnose and cure its own problems, and consequently if reform is to take place, an outside agency has to be brought in to make the changes.

By the same token, in claiming the US episcopacy is corrupt, I am not claiming that the number of scoundrel bishops is necessarily any higher than it was when the episcopacy was healthy. I am simply pointing to the fact that, as an agency, the episcopacy has lost the capacity to do its own housecleaning, especially, but not exclusively, in the arena of sexual turpitude. Should someone object to this characterization, I would reply in these terms: Excellency, let’s look at the American bishops who have been deposed in recent years as a consequence of sexual scandal: Eugene Marino of Atlanta, Robert Sanchez of Santa Fe, Keith Symons of Palm Beach, Daniel Ryan of Springfield, Illinois, Patrick Ziemann of Santa Rosa. Can you name a single instance in which the district attorney or the media did not get there first—a single case, that is, in which you yourselves identified the scoundrel in your ranks and replaced him before the scandal aired on CBS or before the police came knocking on the door?

The question will naturally arise, how can Catholics show respect and obedience to their bishops if they believe the episcopacy is corrupt? The answer is that a Catholic does not respect his bishop or attend to his teaching on the grounds that the bishop is holy, but because the bishop, to the extent that he teaches in union with St. Peter, is supernaturally protected against teaching error—and this holds true whether or not the bishop is a villain and whether or not his compatriots are institutionally corrupt. Our duties toward our bishops are the same now as they ever were and ever will be. Moreover, I have frequently counseled wholesome young men of my acquaintance to enter religious orders that are corrupt in the sense explained above. No shame attaches to membership per se in a corrupt institution (all the ancient religious orders and national episcopacies have undergone cycles of corruption and reform), and the question of one’s vocation to take up a certain burden is entirely distinct from the contingent circumstances in which that vocation is lived out. I stress this point in order to make clear that I am not counseling disobedience or disrespect to bishops, and I am not denying that religious orders, even corrupt ones, are capable of working for the good of souls. But let’s face facts. When more of your priests die by sodomy than by martyrdom, you know you’ve got a problem; when the man you bring in for the fix comes down with AIDS, you know you’ve got a crisis; and when the Pope first gets the facts thanks to 60 Minutes, you know you’re corrupt.

The Catholic Church, being Christ’s bride without spot or wrinkle, is indefectible. She is holy because Christ is holy; she is perfect because Christ is perfect. She can not teach error. Her ministers, however, have sinned in the past, sin now, and will sin in the future until the second coming of Christ. She has lost some of her sons to heresy and some to schism, and those who remained have, in various periods, sunk into corruption. Renewal comes about, of course. God raises up a St. Francis or a St. Dominic, a St. Catherine or a St. Ignatius, who not only reject the endemic moral cowardice of their times, but through their own heroic holiness and passion for truth, bring about a transformation in the lives of their fellow Catholics, teaching them by their own example to love sanctity. The current corruption is nothing new, and reforming saints will certainly appear in our midst. Yet even those of us who are not reformers need not sit down under our present woes. Each of us, according to his station in life, can make a modest contribution to the renewal.

What Rome can do
Require Heads on Platters. No man should be made a bishop, and no bishop should be promoted, unless he embraces authentic Catholic doctrine about sexual morality and leads a morally upright life. But the first condition is too easy to fake; anyone can give lip service to the teaching. Therefore no man should be elevated unless he has a track record as a head-cracker and has cleaned up problems of sexual wrongdoing, by dismissing gay seminarians or seminary faculty, for example, or by getting rid of miscreants at a university chaplaincy. The reason is that gays are perfectly prepared to let one of their own number mouth Church teaching if by so doing he earns a promotion; but if a man exposes their iniquity and acts against it, they will retaliate fiercely if there is any ammunition to be had, any wrongdoing, that is, in their adversary’s past. They will do the necessary vetting out of vindictiveness. Keep in mind that this goes for heterosexual mischief as well. Rome should make it clear that, before a man can be considered episcopal material, he needs scalps hanging from his belt. God knows there is no shortage of opportunities.

What bishops can do
Do ask, do tell. The policy should be made explicit that homosexuals are not admitted into the seminaries. Inter alia, this will result in an increase in vocations, and those of the right kind. Ordained priests found to be homosexual should be given the option of seeking reparative therapy by which they may be freed from their disorder, or else obliged to cease ministry. The time for gentler solutions is past.

Abolish general absolution. It doesn’t take great imagination to guess who has the deepest investment in absolution without confession. End it.

Restore simplicity to priestly life. Physical comfort is the oxygen that feeds the fires of homosexual indulgence. Cut it off. When you enter a rectory, take a look at the liquor cabinet, the videos, the wardrobe, the slick magazines, and ask yourself, “Do I get the impression that the man who lives here is in the habit of saying no to himself?” If the answer is negative, the chances are that his life of chastity is in disorder as well. It goes without saying that reforming bishops should lead by example in this department and not simply exhort.

What laymen can do
Challenge priests uneasy with their priesthood. When a priest leaves the rectory not wearing clerical garb, one needn’t automatically assume that he does so to engage in unnatural vice. It may be natural vice. But there is almost never a good reason for a priest to wear mufti away from home. Confront him. Don’t be taken in by the excuse that it’s his day off. You don’t take a vacation from your priesthood any more than you take a vacation from your marriage. A pastor who sees that a parishioner has left his wedding ring behind on his “boys’ night out” has the duty to ask for an explanation; by the same token, laypeople should not be shy about confronting priests who put off the outward signs of their priesthood. It could be that monsignor doesn’t want to get his collar caught in the gear puller while replacing the main bearings on the parish van; if so, he’ll be delighted to explain.

Use your checkbook as a carrot and stick. Remember that when your pastoral associate flies to Rio during Mardi Gras, you’re footing the bill. Don’t be silent partners in corruption. When a scandal involving a priest hits the papers, first, cut out the pertinent news article; second, write a check for $100 to the Missionaries of Charity (Mother Teresa’s nuns); third, when you receive a request for donations from the outfit in which the scandal occurred, enclose the article in the return envelope along with a photocopy of your check to the MCs and a note to this effect: “My previous contributions were intended for the support of my pastors and the propagation of the faith. From now on you can pay for your own K-Y jelly and your own AZT. I will resume my donations when you have cleaned the stables.” They’ll get the message. Just as important, when a bishop or religious superior shows some spine by a gutsy dismissal or intervention, send him a note telling him what you think, and include a check as well.

Neither singly nor collectively will these or similar tactics solve the gay priest problem; only widespread spiritual renewal incited by heroic personal sanctity will do that. But these pointers might be considered as hairline cracks into which reforming saints might someday drive a wedge so as to bring down the walls of our imprisonment. In the short term, of course, the situation will doubtless deteriorate. It is all but certain that the bishops and the major religious orders, if they move on the crisis at all, will reflexively cede their prerogatives to the “experts.” But, as in every critical moment in the Church’s history, what is wanting is not expertise, but courage.