IRELAND
Irish Times
Una Mullally
The dogs on the street of Maynooth and everywhere else know that gay priests exist in large numbers.
The gay priest is so common, he is a cliche. This week, Catholicism’s most open secret was given another public airing when Archbishop Diarmuid Martin stirred things up by confirming that the archdiocese of Dublin will move three trainee priests to Rome, so that they will avoid St Patrick’s Maynooth seminary, where gay priests have allegedly been using the sex and dating app Grindr.
One would imagine many clergy members are furious at Archbishop Martin for drawing attention to Maynooth, and the sexuality and sex lives of gay priests. The church operates behind closed doors, resents answering to anyone but its own hierarchy, and has massive self-interest in maintaining a pious position in society. Why did Archbishop Martin draw attention to Maynooth now? Maybe he wanted Maynooth to get their act together. Maybe he wanted to get ahead of the second aspect of this news story, which is the much more serious aspect of sexual harassment.
So there seems to be two elements to the Maynooth story. One is around gay priests; that gay priests exist within the seminary, that they are having sex, that they are using the dating and sex app Grindr to communicate with other gay men or other gay priests in order to hook up.
The other is around accusations of sexual harassment, with one former trainee priest saying he was harassed by a member of staff. Men having consensual sex is obviously not illegal, but sexual harassment or assault very much is. Although the church’s warped attitude towards sexuality tends to categorise all sexual contact that takes place outside of heterosexual married partnerships as wrong, it’s important to separate these two elements. The church might view homosexuality as wrong, but it isn’t. Historically, the Catholic Church has failed miserably in adopting a proactive stance on harassment and abuse, as Ireland and other countries witnessed when the devastating incidents of child rape, torture, abuse and assault were exposed over decades, along with the church’s subsequent protection of paedophiles within its organisation.
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