STAFF EDIT: Listen to voices from within

Catholic Church officials have been playing a defensive role in the media over the past year, embroiled in scandals over pedophilia and sustaining public relations blunder after public relations blunder over the misdeeds of numerous priests and the cover-ups of their bishops. Now, after some church officials and lay Catholics have raised public issue with the church’s activity over the past year, some church officials are playing offense and reaching into yet another controversial area where many people outside the church see it as far behind homosexual participation in the priesthood. The discussion has so far been limited to a few renegade Catholic Church officials in America, but it could expand to much more if the church does not listen to its own.

The man making some of the first public rumblings is New Hampshire Bishop John McCormack, who has said gay men should be allowed to serve among the church’s religious leaders. But several priests from colleges around the Boston area, including Boston University’s own Father Paul Hefrich, have joined him, saying sexual orientation should not matter to a priest who has taken a vow of celibacy. Voices of reason have begun to sprout up from within the church and before long, they could become a national movement.

McCormack and Hefrich have some good points. If priests are taking a vow of celibacy, they should not be engaging in sexual activity anyway. Those who break their vows for any kind of sexual activity, especially illegal and immoral activity with minors, have problems with honesty and integrity, which are not problems specific to any sexuality. As the church has seen over the past year, plenty of heterosexual men have problems with integrity.

But the real reason the church should begin to consider admitting gay men, and eventually women, into the priesthood is that their own religious leaders have begun to call for it. If the church ignores the calls of men like McCormack and Hefrich, and others once a movement has developed, it could have much more serious implications for the future of the sect of Christianity than any loss of tradition would. Refusing to acknowledge the legitimate concerns of dedicated Catholics will turn those very Catholics to find other ways to express their spirituality, outside the formal institutions of the Catholic Church.

McCormack and Hefrich’s calls, among others, for admitting homosexual men into the priesthood are sound in themselves and should be considered by the church’s highest officials simply on their merits. But more importantly, church officials should seriously listen to the calls of some of their most dedicated religious leaders. If they don’t, those leaders’ dissatisfaction and lack of acknowledgment may simply drive them away.