There's an alternative for gay men wanting to be priests

There's an alternative for gay men wanting to be priests
Allentown Morning Call

When I was 18, the vocation director for the Roman Catholic archdiocese in which I lived took me to our parish cemetery. He sat me on a tombstone. And he told me that because I was gay I was not fit to be a priest. The moment is burned into my mind. ''I like you,'' he said, ''but I have to think of the Church.'' I had not asked to be ordained or even to go to seminary. I had asked only to join a group of college men who might be interested in seminary after graduation.

He knew I was gay only because, when a colleague of his had asked me about my sexual orientation during an interview earlier that month, I had told the truth. Thirty years later, I find it incredible that I did not foresee that the truth would do me in. All I knew was that the Church had been a home to me and a solace when, as a child, home and solace were hard to find. When the Church told me it loved me because God loved me, I believed it.

I know the rhetoric that claims that the Church did love me but could not dignify my propensity for what it considers to be evil. The official jargon is that we gay people are ''intrinsically disordered.'' The fact that we are affectively oriented toward others of our own sex is a character defect, even if we never act on it. I cannot describe the emotional and spiritual damage it does to a person, especially a young person, to be told that the most tender, most altruistic, most joyful stirrings of their hearts are evil.

Even as the Roman Church showed me how little it actually loved me, I did not stop loving it. That's how abusive relationships work. To this very day, I love it. It was in one of its fonts that Jesus saved me and at one of its altars that he first gave me a foretaste of heaven. At fine Catholic schools from first grade through a doctorate, I learned how to think and, remarkably, how to seek the truth and to name it even when it was not what I expected or wanted to find. Spiritual directors and confessors, wise and holy men and women all, did not let me get away with the dishonesty and sloth that kept God at bay. I have no regrets. Neither, however, am I naïve about how much damage the Church was doing to me even as so many people in it were doing me so much good. Sixteen hundred years ago, under the leadership of St. Augustine, Christians said once and for all that God's saving action in the Sacraments does not depend on the sanctity of the minister. What I discovered, by analogy, is that God's saving action in the Church does not depend on the sanctity of the people at the top. Grace happens where God wills.

Since I was a tiny child, I have felt myself called to the priesthood. Not once have I doubted my call. There came a time, though, when I accepted that it was not to be. It took me a long, long time but I finally and sadly gave up. I left the Roman Catholic Church, not out of anger but out of anguish. And then, a wise Jesuit friend gave me the name of an Episcopal church I should visit. I went one Sunday morning expecting to find nothing and instead found home.

In the 19th century, the Roman Catholic Church declared that the churches of the Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is the American member, are not valid expressions of the true Church. The pope at the time was principally concerned to declare that Anglican priests are not validly ordained. From my earliest days of studying theology, even before the day in the cemetery, I never bought any of it. And so, years after that first Sunday morning, I joined the Episcopal Church, and years after that I was ordained an Episcopal priest. Not for a moment have I thought that I am less a Catholic or less a priest than my Roman counterparts.

When I was asked the deciding question of my life in 1975, I told the truth. Many other gay men were not asked the question or they were less naïve than I was and they lied. Many of them are good priests now. Some of them are my friends, and not one of them has ever touched a child. Not one of them has neglected the daily prayer or pastoral ministry or liturgical presidency or hard study that they promised at their ordination. And today, to a man, they are facing the sad fact that the Church that has always said it loved them never did. Not really. There is great sadness among my friends in the Roman Catholic priesthood. Most of them say that they wish they had taken the road I took. Many of them still might.

But the greatest sadness, I suspect, is not in the priesthood. The greatest sadness is in the hearts of all the gay boys and gay young men who have always felt themselves called to the priesthood and never to anything else. Now they are faced with the deep sadness that they will never live the life that they know is the life they are meant to live; either that or the sadness that they are doomed to a life spent in a closet. That is the stuff that breeds addiction and anger and abuse. That is where sexual scandals begin. But there is an alternative.

The Rev. Dr. Patrick Malloy earned his doctorate from the theology department of the University of Notre Dame. He is rector of Grace Episcopal Church, Allentown.