For decades before Vatican II, in fact, the Church had become a haven for the homosexually inclined—decidedly not for pedophiles, though in our own era of gay liberation it became politically necessary to label the source of the Church’s greatest difficulties as something other than homosexuality. Surveys at the end of the last century showed about a sixth of priests to be homosexually inclined. At one time this wasn’t a particular problem. That it became one was due to a moral transition outside of the Church.
Possibly the Church did not even know it was welcoming a disproportionate number of homosexually inclined men. What is clear now is that the stability of the arrangement rested on a high-stakes paradox. The Church could, without any risk of disorder, be the most tolerant of institutions towards the homosexually inclined—but only if the wider society did not echo that tolerance. As long as zeitgeist, folkways, and penal code were what we would now call homophobic, the Church could simply reap the wondrous windfall of gay intelligence, empathy, and artistic talent without any worry that it might compromise Church teachings on matters of sex. This regime of celibacy, meanwhile, was a gift to the men who availed themselves of it, allowing them to conceal their homosexuality from parents and others, and to stand before society as exemplars rather than outcasts.
When society became tolerant, however, the Church had a problem. Now its sex teachings were not self-evidently a gift. In the modern way of looking at things, they were an oppression, preventing the young and homosexually inclined from blossoming into people with a fully developed sexuality of the sort that was increasingly in evidence in the individualistic society outside the Church. That was the problem that confronted the generation of priests who had entered the Church in the stern world before Vatican II and had pursued their priestly careers in the loosey-goosey world after it. That they chose to honor their old vocation and pursue their new sexual identity is why, for a brief while at the turn of this century, the ancient Church and the newfangled gay lifestyle appeared to be dying together.
