The problems with this article are legion. There are failures of common sense and pastoral care, failures of logic, and applications of church teaching that are simultaneously stunted and overzealous. This is going to be a long thread (five big points); buckle in.
1st: The article starts and ends with focus on priests and what’s broken with them, not on what survivors are telling us about how the church spent decades protecting priests and ignoring them.
2nd: The article simplistically collapses abuse and harassment in seminaries together with criminal abuse of children, and then collapses both with failure to live in celibate chastity.
Committing abuse & failing in celibacy are not the same problem. Though integrity in observing celibacy would obviously preclude sexual abuse, preventing abuse is not the main purpose of celibacy nor is celibacy the best or only way to prevent abuse. These are different failures.
3rd: From the article—“So I agree with Bishop Barron’s warning about the dangers of scapegoating people who share my attraction to men. But recognizing the overwhelming role that homosexuality has played in so many of our past and present scandals is not scapegoating.”
Saying that what you’re not scapegoating does not automatically avoid scapegoating. And there is also cause to worry about how others are using this argument to scapegoat whether the author intends it or not.
4th: A core premise of Mr. Mattson’s argument: “The first reason is that men with homosexual tendencies find it particularly difficult to live out the demands of chastity.” It is asserted, not proven; the only evidence offered is the judgment of one priest psychologist.
Any number of counterexamples—both of homosexual priests living celibacy with integrity, which is at least acknowledged as possible, and patterns of heterosexual priests struggling to do so—are available; none are examined in any depth.
Even if the broad claim of homosexual priests finding celibacy “particularly difficult” were credible, which it is not, there would be exceptions to the claim.
Mr. Mattson acknowledges that his descriptions “do not reflect all homosexual priests,” and some may be able to overcome temptations, but says he thinks such men are rare. Why should we believe his estimate over those who tell us they know many good, holy, celibate gay priests?
Given that there are homosexual men who can be good priests, as Mattson admits, we should care about whether they are able to share their orientation and struggles with their formators or are driven by fear of gay men betraying the priesthood to struggle in isolation and secrecy.
5th: Mr. Mattson quotes from “The Norms for Priestly Ordination, published in 1993 by the USCCB”: “In order to talk about a person as mature, his sexual instinct must have overcome two immature tendencies, narcissism and homosexuality, and must have arrived at heterosexuality.”
This is document he’s referencing but the quoted sentence is in the 1974 “Guide to Formation in Priestly Celibacy” from the Congregation for Catholic Education which is reprinted within the 1993 document. books.google.com/books?id=n1829…
It’s misleading to suggest that this is the last word on this matter, primarily because the actual document that currently governs U.S. seminary formation is the 2005 Program of Priestly Formation (PPF), which contains nothing at all like “must have arrived at heterosexuality.”
The more careful and nuanced interpretation in the PPF is probably because by 2005 we had realized that the suggestion that someone could “overcome” homosexuality and “arrive” at heterosexuality was dangerous and damaging.
The Catechism (nos. 2357-2359) does not associate homosexuality with immaturity or imagine that people will arrive at heterosexuality; instead it says that homosexuality’s “psychological genesis remains largely unexplained.”
Even the 2005 Vatican instruction that men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should not be admitted to seminary, issued by same congregation as the 1974 document, while it speaks of affective maturity, avoids making any suggestion of orientation change as an expectation.
That 2005 Vatican instruction was reaffirmed in 2016, but its implementation has varied widely across the church, largely around the judgment of whether “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” is describing actions and habits or orientation and attractions. americamagazine.org/faith/2016/12/…
Here’s what the contemporary PPF says, in para. 93, “To live fully an effective life of celibate chastity requires (a) a knowledge of one’s sexuality and sexual desires; (b) an acceptance and valuing of one’s sexuality as a good to be directed to God’s service; …
… (c) a lifelong commitment to growth, which means continuously integrating one’s sexuality into a life and ministry shaped and expressed by celibate chastity.” The contemporary formation documents present a far different picture than Mr. Mattson does.
Wrapping up: Mr. Mattson may be correct—and humble and obedient—in saying that celibate chastity would be difficult or impossible for him. But he has no grounds to generalize that claim to all gay men, and church teaching does not require such a generalization.
The Catechism does, however, teach that LGBT people “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.” I wish this article had upheld that standard.
Again: survivors are telling us how the church spent decades protecting priests and ignoring them. Let's focus on that problem rather than using the abuse scandal as a proxy for another fight entirely.
