It took me roughly a year of Roman Catholic minor seminary to realize that I didn’t want to be a priest, and that was a decision fueled primarily by a growing attraction to girls.
I just loved women. I realized, even as a teenager, that I didn’t have enough of a calling to make a commitment to be celibate. So, I looked at my parents one holiday, told them I was never going back, called the seminary and asked them to pack up my stuff and ship it home.
I had lost my childhood interest in being saintly. I was not going to be crucified upside down on a beach in the Orient, Blessed Charles Martin, a modern martyr, eventually on a holy card crediting me with conversion of Chinese communists. I spent many years wondering about the seminary even after I had shipped out. There were terrific priests there. The education was spectacular. To this day, they are great, valiant men.
But what kind of an institution would collect up all of that teenage testosterone and put it in one place? Wasn’t that asking for trouble? On one level, no, because sexuality just wasn’t a subject for discussion in the missionary order seminary of the 1950s and 1960s.
Even in the public school, beyond those hilarious venereal disease movies, sex education was nearly non-existent. It would have been out of the question in a Roman Catholic seminary. If anything, the subject itself was hidden, almost kept under lock and key as though it involved the potentially explosive components of a complicated chemistry experiment, which, now that I think of it, isn’t a bad way to describe the sexual development of teenage boys, at least the ones I helped raise.
On another level, yes it was asking for trouble and I think the Roman Catholic Church now knows why.
If you create a place in which the most defining and tumultuous characteristic in an age group is suppressed, ignored, hidden, diminished, whatever, it’s likely to have an important impact on the demographics of the people you draw into the process.
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One potential group of candidates most certainly would be people whose initial experiences with sexuality were so troubling that they found themselves searching for safe harbor, looking for anything that would carry them away from the guilt, the pain, the conflict, connected to abuse or dysfunction.
Add to that group those whose parents thought they would solve problems by sending young men to a seminary for morality repair, as though it were some kind of a spa for troubled youth, when what they really needed was psychiatric intervention.
This applied as much recently, I believe, as it applied in 1962.
The celibate life might seem a harbor from sexual conflict, but of course, it is not.
What is remarkable about celibacy and the men and women who embrace it is that it places them full in the face of the sexual storm. It is not as though their feelings are shut off. They have made a difficult, thoughtful choice to be alive in the world, but separate from a powerful part of it.
These reflections have been revived by two recent developments, one being the release of 126 clergy case files by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles as part of its negotiations to settle hundreds of abuse complaints.
The second is the sign that the church seems to be organizing a purge of some sort aimed at homosexuals in its seminaries.
It would be a vast tragedy to drive homosexuals who are committed to the celibate life of the Roman Catholic priesthood away from seminaries, particularly if you believe, as I do, that they are answering a call.
If God calls you, after all, can you deny it?
And should any institution try to get in the way?
It creates a solution to a problem that, in the first place, does not exist.
Homosexuality and child molestation are not interchangeable phrases.
Why limit the ranks of an already diminished priesthood by driving out good men who are prepared to step up and make the life-defining commitment to celibacy?
At the same time, I am thinking back to that seminary world of my youth.
How many of those Los Angeles cases, those Chicago cases, those Philadelphia cases, those Boston cases, have their roots in the creation of a seminary setting (one that no longer exists) that allowed very troubled young men to assume they could hide, or find some escape, from a pathology that, ultimately, would not be denied?
I don’t know.
I will not diminish the evil that child molestation represents. There are penalties for this kind of crime, and the church has shamed itself in shifting perpetrators and lying about abuse for years.
At the same time, I cannot help but think that in many cases, these men were drawn to what they mistakenly believed was some kind of haven in the storm, which it most certainly was not.
That kind of denial always comes home.
So now the consequences settle on us all.
It takes a Christlike sense of forgiveness to look at this institution and think that someday it will have repaired this damage.
And it takes an equally big sense of forgiveness to see pathology for what it is, to hate the sin and forgive the sinner.
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