UNITED KINGDOM
The Independent
Peter Stanford
Sunday 08 April 2012
He claims that half of all Catholic priests are gay – and has himself been married to his husband for 14 years. He believes celibacy is to blame for many of the Church’s problems – and that the Vatican must take responsibility for the paedophilia in its midst. Is it any wonder so many people want rid of Father Bernard Lynch?
Unlike other whistleblowers, Lynch doesn’t have a straightforward job. Vocation is more accurate, for he is a Catholic priest, a member of the Society of African Missions religious order for the past 42 years. That sense of being called has sustained his work, he says, through “terrible” times. In the 1980s, in New York, he was one of the first priests to support those dying from Aids-related illnesses. It was a ministry that earned him awards from secular authorities – including New York’s mayor – but hostility from the Vatican, which was then describing the Aids pandemic as the “natural result of unnatural acts”. It would have preferred he kept well away.
The tension between Lynch and his superiors ended up involving the FBI – called in by the local cardinal to investigate him – and a trial on trumped-up charges in 1989. “It was soul murder,” Lynch recalls, “and it will follow me to my grave.” The judge dismissed the charges out of hand in what became a cause célèbre for progressively minded Catholics at the time, later the subject of a best-selling book and several TV documentaries.
To escape the furore, Lynch came to live in England in 1992. Today, his ministry includes counselling gay priests who are in the closet in a Church that describes homosexuality as “intrinsically disordered”. Yet he claims that as many as 50 per cent of Catholic clergy are gay. It is an example of how this 64-year-old has continued to point things out that discomfort his ecclesiastical superiors. Another was his decision to speak in defence of gay rights at the “Protest the Pope” demonstration that greeted Benedict XVI in London in 2010. Lynch lined up in full clerical garb alongside Peter Tatchell and militant atheist Richard Dawkins. Yet somehow, he has always managed to stay within the fold of his Catholic religious order. Until now.
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