To see disorder in our sexuality
This is what happens when the Catholic Church tells gay children they are ‘intrinsically disordered’
I was told to lie the first time I confessed my sexuality to the Church.
“You’re going to be shown a lot of semi-naked men interacting physically with young boys,” the rector of my seminary told me, leaning in like he was whispering a sordid but juicy family secret. “The key is, when they ask you what you see,” he chuckled and shook his head, “tell them it looks perfectly normal.”
I had disclosed to him that I was gay my first week in seminary. This was after his encouragement to all of us first-years to find a priest on staff we could confide in if we were, in fact, “struggling with same-sex attractions.” Our rector, who was not shy about his own orthodoxy or heterosexuality, had recruited me to join his seminary despite living in a city on the other side of the country, with its own — albeit notoriously lukewarm — college seminary, because he said he saw a great deal of leadership potential in me.
So when he instructed me, sitting in the warm afternoon glow of his office, how to respond to the upcoming psychosexual evaluation that all new seminarians were required to take, I wasn’t sure if he was giving me the correct answers just to make things easy on me or because he didn’t trust me, a 19-year-old gay seminarian, to get the questions right on my own.
“You’ve got to tell them, ‘No, I don’t see a gross old man trying to have sex with a teenage boy!’” He rolled his eyes and laughed again. “Don’t worry. You’ll do fine.”
The message from my rector resonated loud and clear — give the answers that make you look as squeaky clean and hetero as possible.
The images the psychologist asked me to describe were not the abstract inkblots of a Rorschach test but rather intricate charcoal sketches of domestic life. Sitting in the hall outside her office, I had already completed a questionnaire composed of hundreds of questions about my childhood and sexual history and attractions, all of which I lied about whenever it veeredinto matters of my being gay. “Have I ever had any sexual contact with a member of the same sex?” Absolutely not. Heaven forbid. The message from my rector resonated loud and clear — give the answers that make you look as squeaky clean and hetero as possible.
The first image I was shown was a man sitting alone on his bed, depression etched into his face, eyes cast down at his groin. “Uhh,” I stalled, trying to figure out how to spin an image that screamed sexual frustration. “This is a guy who is deep in prayer. Maybe he is doing the Examen at the end of the day?”
The psychologist squinted slightly and tilted her head to the side as if looking for tells of a lie. I tried to remember which way not to look while responding — was it up and to the left? She placed the image facedown on the coffee table and recorded something swiftly on her notepad.
Next came an image of a man, shirtless, muscles strained and bulging, pinning down a boy whose face was twisted in agony. Around them were the trappings of an elegant living room, polite and set out for a casual evening. “Dear God,” I thought to myself, the image terrifying. My rector’s instructions to find all the images perfectly normal seemed like a taunt now. I smiled to try and cover the way my stomach was churning.
“What do you see?” the psychologist asked. I took a deep breath, feeling like I was about to throw up. “Well, this,” I said in an attempt at confidence but which stumbled out in a rapid-fire ramble, “is a father who is very close with his son. And they are on the floor wrestling — they do this all the time. And the father is tickling the son, which the son loves.”
Hard swallow. This is what I have to do serve the Church.
The card was set down on the table, and she scrawled out more notes, her pen racing across the page. I imagined her writing out “LIAR” and underlining it five times. More images were shown that were variations of the same theme. One implied a man was about to take a shower with a young boy. Another was a guy looking at a magazine and trying to hide its content from someone who walked in the room.
Was I really some kind of deviant if I saw anything bizarre in them? Did seeing implications of perversion imply I wanted to do those things myself? The evaluation methods were never explained to me, and my rector never told me my results. I left the psychologist’s office feeling filthy and vulgar. While I must have passed, I was stuck with the implication that my psychosexual health — if reported honestly — would be another story. If a normal person would have seen nothing there, then what did that make me?
Many years later, shame strangling my quiet moments of prayer with memories of lying about what I saw and who I was, I realized that at a minimum, I had been primed to see disorder in the drawings by my rector, who had told me what I would think of them before I ever had the chance to form my own interpretations.
So I never talked about my sexuality with a rector or even a spiritual director again, and in my silence, I was quickly promoted to various positions of leadership in the seminary.
As the Church wrestles with the public scandals such psychosexual evaluations were ostensibly designed to weed out, some have suggested that a healthy first step is allowing gay priests and seminarians to be open about their sexuality. Lift the cover of secrecy and shame and allow in some light and affirmation for those who are at least living according to the Catholic Church’s teachings and expectations. As someone who struggled for years in the lonely pain of the closet in seminary, I wholeheartedly agree. But I don’t think that goes far enough.
We don’t often talk about why our priests mess up sexually. At least not the gay ones, who make up the majority of the abuses that have taken place this past half-century. Still struggling to eradicate cover-ups and the perpetual shuffling of priests caught in abuse, we haven’t had the space or maybe the emotional energy to examine together how that happens. How does a Cardinal McCarrick happen? Inviting young seminarians into his bed and being credibly accused of abusing a minor?
“No, I don’t see a gross old man trying to have sex with a teenage boy!” my rector had told me to say.
I am not surprised that the Church leadership continues to see whatever they want to see, whether it is an old man relaxing harmlessly with a teenager in the rectory or a dangerous cabal of homosexual clergy out to subvert the entire vibrant and essential orthodoxy of the Church’s internal life and its influence on the culture. When it comes to positions of power, people learn to see what will protect their own standing.
But what I care about just as much are those of us who have been taught to see nothing but evil in our own sexuality before it’s even acted upon — who have internalized the Church’s language about what our lives are capable of because we desperately grasp at faith like a lifeline in the midst of a tempest.
The Catholic Church tends to view its language on homosexuality as an astute analysis. But what if it’s something else?
It has been over 30 years since Cardinal Ratzinger called homosexuality an “objective disorder.” I grew up going to Catholic conferences where homosexuality’s removal from the DSM — psychology’s field manual of diagnosable disorders — was regularly listed as the beginning of the downfall of American sexual morality.
The Catholic Church tends to view its language on homosexuality as an astute analysis. But what if it’s something else?
My friend John (name changed) used to be a Catholic priest. I had met him only once before he was sent to one of those places they send priests when they mess up — some kind of cross between rehab and a retreat center. John posted online that he would be unreachable for an indeterminate amount of time, leaving a mailing address behind. I wrote to offer my support and prayers. Whatever was going on, I imagined it must be lonely and painful. That was when he wrote back to tell me he had done something inappropriate online with an 18-year-old boy. That was when he told me he was gay. That was when we became friends.
In an effort to more deeply understand what being told you are intrinsicallydisordered does to a person, I reached out to him to ask if he would be willing to share his story with me one more time.
John grew up in the kind of Catholic family that the cultural warriors of the late ’90s and early aughts hated. They went to Mass most Sundays, but in keeping with the rest of largely progressive Rhode Island, they didn’t take the Church’s moral commands too seriously. Even still, growing up with three athletic and very heterosexual older brothers left him quiet about his sexuality. As his peers started dating and testing out young love, he feared that a betrayal of such masculine stereotypes wouldn’t be met with sensitivity.
When he finally came out to his mother and older siblings in his early twenties, they were only upset he hadn’t told them sooner. John’s father had passed away the year before in a car accident, “but I know he would have loved me to death,” John told me with pride.
This is rare: to have a reality like this welling up within you, unstoppable and passionate, and to have the people you trust most honor and celebrate it. To believe you are good and every bit as capable of bringing beauty and love into this world through your relationships as the one that created you.
For most of us who are gay, the first great revelation about our sexuality is met with bitter rejection, one that accuses us of breaking the bonds of family from within our own hearts. Our uncontrollable longings for companionship are reduced to a “lifestyle.” We are seen as incapable of the very love that binds the ones who reject us.
John was spared that. Yet the Church does not change its message merely because you don’t believe it.
A few years after coming out to his family, John joined a diocesan seminary and then a religious order. He gravitated toward a community that encouraged its members to be open with one another about their sexuality. “It was a breath of fresh air,” he told me, “to get to a religious order that allowed you, within the context of celibacy, to talk about your feelings from the first day of formation all the way through the 20 years I was there. In the common room, at the dining room table with my fellow brothers — gay, straight, it didn’t matter.”
Even if your family, even if your brother priests offer you unconditional acceptance, for a Catholic, the Church will always be your Mother.
Out in the world, ministering to Catholics at the public university where he served, things were more complicated. Gay men and lesbian women would come to his office in tears trying to make sense of their lives. They were told they were intrinsically disordered by the Catechism, and John would watch it eat away at their self-esteem, their ability to love themselves. Would they be better outside the Church, in a community that told them they were beautiful just as they are? How do you, as a Catholic priest, tell someone that?
Weddings, John told me, cut even deeper. Here’s John:
As a celibate Catholic priest, I did over 400 weddings in the 20 years I was in formation. And that was before gay marriage was a thing. This was before it was legal. And those 400 weddings really ate at me. I wanted to be happy for the bride and groom, you know? I wanted to celebrate their love, but inside, I was crying. And I did a lot of campus ministry in my 20 years, so a lot of couples asked me to do their weddings. And I loved them; I really did. There were some really wonderful people for whom I did their weddings, but internally I was thinking, shit, I can never have this. For one, as a celibate male, I can never have this. And number two, as a gay man, I can never have this. That was always eating at me kind of in a corrosive way over those 20 years.
This is a priest standing on the altar asking a couple to make a commitment for life as a representative of a church that believes he is fundamentally incapable of a such a promise. He is able to decide if a straight couple is ready to make such vows but never capable of making them himself.
Eventually, 20 years of such bifurcated living caught up to John. Even if your family, even if your brother priests offer you unconditional acceptance, for a Catholic, the Church will always be your Mother. And every sincere son or daughter can’t help but see themselves, if only in part, through their mother’s eyes.
When John turned 50, he messed up. He was out promoting vocations to his order and sent flirtatious Facebook messages to an 18-year-old boy. The boy’s mother saw them and reported it to John’s superior. He recognized the gravity of his situation immediately.
“I had feelings for this 18-year-old, and that scared me,” John said. “Because, like, holy shit, he could have been 17. He could have been 16. And nothing ever happened between me and this boy, but that scared the shit out of me. I knew that I needed help at that point.”
They agreed he should take time away from ministry and go into therapy. John had resisted any physical attractions for 20 years, but sitting in his religious superior’s office, he suddenly had to realize just how quickly his resolve was weakening. He was sent away for what would become four months of intensive counseling and examination.
John says the institution had a little mix of everyone. Some priests were there because they had done horrendous crimes. Others were there for struggles with alcoholism. The goal was healing, but just as essentially, it was to determine if he could be trusted again in ministry. There were background checks and lie detector tests. There was spiritual direction and endless therapy.
“I mean, I was completely embarrassed, and I let myself down, and I let my religious order down,” John explained. “I really did love my order, and I never wanted to hurt them in any way. I was just freaking embarrassed; I was devastated. I disappointed myself terribly that I got up to that line. And I was a guy who always followed the rules. I was a good boy. I never wanted to hurt anyone. I never wanted anyone to be angry at me. That was all my life — I was a pleaser.”
Months into therapy, John had an insight that helped explain how he had come to exchange those messages with someone so young: “I never had the teen experiences of first love or dating, of holding hands, of kissing. I never had any of that growing up in junior high school or high school, college. And so I think I was trying to, unconsciously, trying to have that. Have that young love that I never had.”
“It didn’t come out of the blue that I was attracted to a young man,” John continued. “In my own head and in my own heart, I was a young man. I was 18 and 19 and 20 years old, seeking love and wanting to express that love to my peer. Now, I was 50. I was not 18. But in my head and in my heart, I was like an 18-year-old, looking for love and acceptance and intimacy.”
John still saw an essential part of himself as back in Rhode Island, a high schooler ready to take the steps the rest of the world took to grow up.
For most observers, it’s hard to imagine how one could act out like this. But if you already see yourself as inherently disordered, this is you. There is no “right” way for you to be sexual. This is the fundamental difference between messing up when you believe you are inherently good and when you believe you’re incapable of goodness. Of course, power and secrecy affect priests who make such mistakes. But it is hard to discount the importance of believing you’re fundamentally broken.
This is the cost of telling our gay children they are intrinsically disordered. Some will eventually decide they would rather leave the Catholic Church and believe in a better version of themselves.
There is a saying that hurt people hurt people. Believing you are broken will lead you to act in broken ways.
John suspects he would have been much better able to handle his sexuality if he had grown up in a church that had told him he was good — capable of a committed, faithful relationship and intimacy. “Maybe I would have been more brave,” he said. “Maybe I would have come out earlier. And maybe I would have been allowed to love a man earlier. I think the trajectory of my life would have been very different.”
On completing his four months of therapy, John decided to leave the priesthood. He’d come too close to truly slipping up after two decades of ministry. But, more importantly, he wanted to learn to love himself again. To believe he was capable of more than just avoiding scandal. To make a life for himself where he knew intimacy and relationship and a right order of things.
This is the cost of telling our gay children they are intrinsically disordered.Some will rather leave the Church than believe they are inherently wrong.Others will listen to the Church they call Mother and believe that, sexually, they are only capable of causing harm.
Who would Theodore McCarrick have grown up to be if he’d been taught that his attractions to men and his ache for intimacy were beautiful things — part of being fearfully and wonderfully made by a God who built us for love. That by honoring consent and the dignity of the men he felt affections for, he could take part in the love endowed by his creator. Regardless of whether he would have ended up in a scarlet zucchetto or a groom’s tuxedo, he would at least have believed himself to be more than a repressed monster.
Tounderstand the actions that cause gay men and women to act out in ways that hurt others is not to excuse it. John knows he was terribly wrong for what he did. But we can’t try to stop these things from happening in the future if we don’t take a sober look at why they happen to begin with.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I could show the Catholic Church, sitting intently on a couch before me, a charcoal drawing of my own. There would be two middle-aged women holding hands, one resting her head on the shoulder of the other, gazing up at a young boy who is belting out a solo on a stage at the school play. Both would have tears in their eyes, the kind of alligator tears that only a mixture of pride and gratitude and a heart bursting at the seams can bring.
“What do you see?” I would ask.
Think about it before you answer. Because your children will believe you.