Quiddity
UndertheInfluenceofGiants
COMMENTARY & OPINION
National Catholic Register
The Vaticans new document on seminaries brings it all back. By Scott McDermott.
December 16, 2005 / The Vaticans new document on the ordination of homosexuals brings it all back.
I sat in the mental hospital for five days, reading Trollope, watching the Nagano Olympics, giving God an earful.
Why me, Lord? Why, when all I wanted was to serve God as his priest?
My desire for priesthood was born out of gratitude for my deliverance from the homosexual lifestyle and from my history of depression. Since my conversion to the Catholic faith in 1992, I had functioned for five years without anti-depressants, and I thought I had mastered my same-sex attractions sufficiently to manage as a priest.
My therapist knew I wasnt ready. I didnt listen, and unfortunately, the religious community that had accepted me to its novitiate didnt ask for extensive psychological documentation. Nor did the vocation director probe my struggles with homosexuality and depression in any detail.
There was one obstacle, however. I was expected at the novitiate in January 1998, but first I had to pay off all my debts, as this was an austere community and I would be leaving the world behind. My plan was to write my way out of debt by marketing my fiction.
As my unpublished novels remained unpublished, I grew increasingly hard to live with, and as soon as the January deadline passed, I went into free fall. Like Icarus, the mythological boy who flew to the sun on wings of wax, I had overreached. Flying too high, I crashed into the psychiatric ward, where my dream of priesthood vanished.
In the debate over the recent Vatican instruction on homosexual candidates for priesthood, many writers have already discussed the need for priests to have a healthy masculinity, so that they can act as fathers to their flocks and as husbands to the bride of Christ, the Church. Others have discussed the temptations to which homosexually inclined men may be exposed in the seminary. But the issue is broader than sexual identity.
Many scientific studies have shown that homosexuals have a much higher incidence of clinical depression, suicidal tendencies, and drug and alcohol addiction than the general public. Scholarly articles proving this point are simply too numerous to list here. In fact, the scientific literature is completely unequivocal on this point.
In my own case, I had experienced significant healing in terms of my gender identity, but my other psychological symptoms were sufficient to disqualify me from priesthood. After my collapse, a vocation director from another religious order put it to me kindly but firmly. The priesthood is a stressful job, he said.
To hammer this point home, he told me about a young man, a friend of the religious community, who had been killed in a motorcycle accident. At the crash scene, the vocation director had the gruesome task of finding something to anoint.
His point was clear. Faced with that type of priestly responsibility, I would have had a panic attack. A few scenes like that, and I would probably have ended up back on the ward, with ample time to read all 47 of Trollopes novels.
Priests tend to see people at moments of crisis: not only death, but also in their struggles with their own personal demons of addiction, crime, mental illness, and, yes, sexual brokenness (not to mention actual demons). The priest must be strong and healthy or he will be drawn into this maelstrom himself.
This is not to say that people, like me, who struggle with emotional difficulties and same-sex attractions, cannot be great, committed Christians.
National Catholic Register
The Vaticans new document on seminaries brings it all back. By Scott McDermott.
December 16, 2005 / The Vaticans new document on the ordination of homosexuals brings it all back.
I sat in the mental hospital for five days, reading Trollope, watching the Nagano Olympics, giving God an earful.
Why me, Lord? Why, when all I wanted was to serve God as his priest?
My desire for priesthood was born out of gratitude for my deliverance from the homosexual lifestyle and from my history of depression. Since my conversion to the Catholic faith in 1992, I had functioned for five years without anti-depressants, and I thought I had mastered my same-sex attractions sufficiently to manage as a priest.
My therapist knew I wasnt ready. I didnt listen, and unfortunately, the religious community that had accepted me to its novitiate didnt ask for extensive psychological documentation. Nor did the vocation director probe my struggles with homosexuality and depression in any detail.
There was one obstacle, however. I was expected at the novitiate in January 1998, but first I had to pay off all my debts, as this was an austere community and I would be leaving the world behind. My plan was to write my way out of debt by marketing my fiction.
As my unpublished novels remained unpublished, I grew increasingly hard to live with, and as soon as the January deadline passed, I went into free fall. Like Icarus, the mythological boy who flew to the sun on wings of wax, I had overreached. Flying too high, I crashed into the psychiatric ward, where my dream of priesthood vanished.
In the debate over the recent Vatican instruction on homosexual candidates for priesthood, many writers have already discussed the need for priests to have a healthy masculinity, so that they can act as fathers to their flocks and as husbands to the bride of Christ, the Church. Others have discussed the temptations to which homosexually inclined men may be exposed in the seminary. But the issue is broader than sexual identity.
Many scientific studies have shown that homosexuals have a much higher incidence of clinical depression, suicidal tendencies, and drug and alcohol addiction than the general public. Scholarly articles proving this point are simply too numerous to list here. In fact, the scientific literature is completely unequivocal on this point.
In my own case, I had experienced significant healing in terms of my gender identity, but my other psychological symptoms were sufficient to disqualify me from priesthood. After my collapse, a vocation director from another religious order put it to me kindly but firmly. The priesthood is a stressful job, he said.
To hammer this point home, he told me about a young man, a friend of the religious community, who had been killed in a motorcycle accident. At the crash scene, the vocation director had the gruesome task of finding something to anoint.
His point was clear. Faced with that type of priestly responsibility, I would have had a panic attack. A few scenes like that, and I would probably have ended up back on the ward, with ample time to read all 47 of Trollopes novels.
Priests tend to see people at moments of crisis: not only death, but also in their struggles with their own personal demons of addiction, crime, mental illness, and, yes, sexual brokenness (not to mention actual demons). The priest must be strong and healthy or he will be drawn into this maelstrom himself.
This is not to say that people, like me, who struggle with emotional difficulties and same-sex attractions, cannot be great, committed Christians.