The New York Times recently printed an article about the “brave” priest who has come out as gay. The article quotes him saying, the priesthood “is not a closet. It is a cage.”
In today’s climate, there is NOTHING “brave” about coming out as gay. NOTHING. What was brave was the powerful response another priest published … which has been removed from Twitter.
Fortunately, somebody copied it.
“I have no patience for priests who ‘come out’ as gay and insist the priesthood is some sort of cage. Nobody forced you to become a priest. The faithful don’t need to deal with your issues, pal. They don’t deserve to deal with any of our issues. We serve them. Period.
“Priests who insist they ‘can’t be who they are’ in the priesthood mean to say ‘who they are’ isn’t a priest as the Church has ‘always’ understood priesthood. The last thing the faithful need are priests who make their sexuality their primary identity.
“‘Being gay’ and ‘coming out’ may seem to you, Father, as being true to your authentic self, but that’s contrary to your ordination, which makes your authentic self a person in persona Christi in the service of the people of God.
“If you can’t live that way, if you can’t give yourself freely, without making your sexuality “a thing” in this equation, then be a man, be noble, and as our Holy Father Pope Francis says: leave the priesthood.
“The same is true, btw, of any priest who finds himself engrossed and completely distracted by the attention and subtleties of the fairer sex. If your priesthood is about being with women you’re attracted to, your thoughts and language always sexual, you’ve got a problem.
“A Father cannot help his children if he’s a broken distracted mess of a man requiring them to pick him up and set him aright. That’s the classic role reversal of a dysfunctional family. It has no place in the priesthood and the Church.”
– Fr. Thomas Petri, OP
