Still Running Off at the Keyboard

IS THERE ANY purge coming in the Catholic Church? There are clues detected by the secular media that this may be the case. Last week the Associated Press flagged a story in the right-leaning National Catholic Register, a weekly American newspaper published by the Legionaries of Christ, the ultra-conservative religious order. In a front-page report, dated 7 September, Archbishop Edwin O’Brien told the Register: “I think anyone who has engaged in homosexual activity, or has strong homosexual inclinations, would be best not to apply to a seminary and not to be accepted into a seminary.”

Archbishop O’Brien told the paper that even a man who had been celibate for 10 years or more should be barred from entering seminaries. As an aside, he noted: “The Holy See should be coming out with a document about this.” Later he told the Associated Press that he expected such a Vatican directive would appear before the end of the year. The archbishop should not be dismissed as just another opinionated cleric. He is coordinating the Vatican-ordered “Apostolic Visitation”, the year-long investigation of American seminaries and formation programmes for religious orders that is part of the Vatican’s response to the clerical sexual abuse crisis in the United States.

His blunt comments reveal what many priests have long feared: blame for that clerical crisis is being placed squarely on the shoulders of celibate gay men in the priesthood rather than on the bishops who moved paedophile priests away from the scene of their assaults to new locations where they struck again, abusing more children.

One question in the recently released Instrumentum Laboris, the Vatican’s working document that provides guidelines for the Visitation, reads: “Is there evidence of homosexuality in the seminary? (This question must be asked.)” Another, reviving clerical language from the 1940s, reads: “Do the faculty formation watch out for signs of particular friendships?”

News of this should surprise no one. In 2002, in the wake of the abuse crisis, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, then the Archbishop of Philadelphia, spoke for many American bishops when he opined: “We feel that a person who is homosexually oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood, even if he has never committed any homosexual act.” That same year the official Vatican spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, said, “People with these inclinations can simply not be ordained.”

Certainly the vast majority of the reported sexual abuse cases in the United States were those of men preying on boys and adolescent males. But the Vatican and many bishops have repeatedly blamed all gay priests indiscriminately, and, as Archbishop O’Brien’s comments indicate, are about to declare that even a psychologically healthy gay man who can live a celibate life will be barred from seminaries.

This is the worst kind of prejudice, and should be seen as an embarrassment for the Church, rather than the basis for its selection of candidates for the sacrament of orders.

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