I would be surprised if that was the primary homosexuality-enriching step, given that reporting has always been that quite a lot of low-level parish-level priests are also gay. (Note, for example, how many of the sexual abuse scandal victims were boys/men.) I would guess that it operates fairly steadily at all levels, starting from simply which young boys opt for the priesthood (known to be a demand and difficult occupation even if the celibacy requirement is, for you, not so onerous) and operating from there; if I had to guess where the biggest enrichment is, it’d be at the ‘leaving your country for the Vatican’ step, given how notoriously gay the Vatican is. So going there suggests either that you are gay (and so the buggery isn’t a bug, it’s a feature) or you are highly ambitious and don’t mind it (or are willing to exploit it and again, not a bug but a feature).
I went to a Jesuit high school in the ’80′s. There were some priests who were, in the language of the day, “flaming” homosexuals. They ran the choir and theater programs, and it seemed pretty obvious that if they were outside the priesthood, they would have been gay. One of my classmates later became a priest, and he’s openly out to another alum who’s gay. While this is anecdata, there was a wide river of Denial, usu assuming someone “couldn’t be gay” if they had taken the vow of celibacy. The Church’s sex negativity makes any open discussion nearly impossible, and it’s a hard pitch to heterosexuals that they should foreswear sex for their entire life. Paul Pilgram, SJ, our principal, was later exposed as a pedophile, although he was not considered one of the “flamers” at our HS
Yeah, I think a lot of anecdata point to the fact that a pretty significant portion of the clergy are gay. The most interesting question in my view is how and why that portion might rise to very high levels ~80% once you get to Rome.
I would be surprised if that was the primary homosexuality-enriching step, given that reporting has always been that quite a lot of low-level parish-level priests are also gay. (Note, for example, how many of the sexual abuse scandal victims were boys/men.) I would guess that it operates fairly steadily at all levels, starting from simply which young boys opt for the priesthood (known to be a demand and difficult occupation even if the celibacy requirement is, for you, not so onerous) and operating from there; if I had to guess where the biggest enrichment is, it’d be at the ‘leaving your country for the Vatican’ step, given how notoriously gay the Vatican is. So going there suggests either that you are gay (and so the buggery isn’t a bug, it’s a feature) or you are highly ambitious and don’t mind it (or are willing to exploit it and again, not a bug but a feature).
I went to a Jesuit high school in the ’80′s. There were some priests who were, in the language of the day, “flaming” homosexuals. They ran the choir and theater programs, and it seemed pretty obvious that if they were outside the priesthood, they would have been gay. One of my classmates later became a priest, and he’s openly out to another alum who’s gay.
While this is anecdata, there was a wide river of Denial, usu assuming someone “couldn’t be gay” if they had taken the vow of celibacy. The Church’s sex negativity makes any open discussion nearly impossible, and it’s a hard pitch to heterosexuals that they should foreswear sex for their entire life.
Paul Pilgram, SJ, our principal, was later exposed as a pedophile, although he was not considered one of the “flamers” at our HS
Yeah, I think a lot of anecdata point to the fact that a pretty significant portion of the clergy are gay. The most interesting question in my view is how and why that portion might rise to very high levels ~80% once you get to Rome.