The various statements from Catholic officials about how homosexuality is intrinsically disordered and that the presence of gay men in the Catholic priesthood is potentially damaging to the entire Catholic Church have shocked and outraged many Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic. What is really shocking, however, is that such statements are surprising anyone.
These ideas have been the official Vatican policy for a long time — people have simply been living in an era when that policy was overlooked and enforced with laxity, if at all. The question is, what if anything can or will American Catholics do about it? If gay priests are purged, will they accept it and do nothing? Will they exert pressure on the Vatican to get the policies changed?
This is now a critical juncture for the Roman Catholic Church, particularly in America. Most studies put the number of gay Catholic priests at around 25 percent or higher - dismissing them would devastate an already imperiled American priesthood. The median age of American priests is nearly 60 and getting older. The number of people entering seminaries has dropped by more than 80 percent since 1966, even as the Catholic population in America has increased dramatically.
This is, in fact, one of the reasons why there are many calls for allowing priests to marry. Of the more than 1000 priests who resign every year, most of those do so in order to get married. Things are so bad in the United States that many parishes are “importing” priests from abroad — that is the only way they have enough to scrape by.
What this means is that if the Vatican takes active measures to dismiss gays from the priesthood and to exclude them from seminaries, the current crisis will become so severe that no one knows what will happen. Will the Catholic Church in the United States be able to effectively function if it loses at least a quarter of its priests and an untold number of bishops and prospective seminary students? Perhaps, but only with great difficulty and at the risk of seriously failing to serve the religious needs of Catholics across the country.
We shouldn’t have too long to find out one way or the other. The Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education has been preparing new guidelines designed to regulate the acceptance of candidates to the preisthood — guidelines which are expected to specifically address the candidacy and ordination of gays. Although nothing has been officially released, those who have seen initial drafts say that men with “homosexual tendencies” may be barred entirely from seminaries.
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