To what extent can the decline in recruitment to the Catholic priesthood be put down to the fact that gay men no longer feel the same need as in years past to hide away in the religious life? The thought occurred to me while reading reports of the reaction of gay Catholics in the US to the response of the Church there to the torrent of cases of clerical child sex abuse.

A remarkably high percentage of these cases has been of same-sex abuse. This appears to have given a number of bishops and influential Catholic commentators an opening to argue that the phenomenon can best be explained by reference to the

perverse or degenerate character of homosexuality and not to anything in the nature of Catholicism or in the practices and structures of the institutional Church .

Insofar as the Church has been at fault, runs the argument, it’s on account of its lax policing of sexual deviants. The appropriate response, then, is to crack down harder on homosexuality within the Church and more generally.

This is the argument implicitly advanced by the Pope when he commented following his April meeting with US cardinals that it was the contamination of the Church by the secular world which lay behind the crisis.

Recently, one of the key officials of the New York diocese, Monsignor Eugene Clark, number two to the embattled Cardinal Egan, delivered a ferocious anti-gay sermon in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, explicitly linking the child abuse scandal to the gay sexuality of a percentage of priests. On the following Sunday, April 28th, about 150 gay Catholics and their supporters picketed Sunday mass at St. Patrick’s in protest. “This must be a turning point for the gay Catholic community,” said Irish activist Brendan Fay, who carried a placard with a photograph of his friend Fr. Mychal Judge, gay chaplain of the NY Fire Department and September 11th “martyr”.

Emboldened by the demonstration, gay Catholics, including a number of former priests, have been testifying in New York publications to their experiences within the Church. “Millions of us took the vow, seeking redemption from our allegedly lost selves, or at least sanctuary from a secular world in which homophobia was also gaining in virulence, leading our lives within our faith while sealing our own dismal fate within it,” wrote one ex-priest in the Village Voice. The arena they sought sanctuary in had proven a prison, with inevitable severe psychic damage.

Another former priest challenged the common estimate that between 30 and 50 percent of US priests are gay. It’s more like 70 to 80 percent, he insisted. The Catholic Church, declared, has depended on gays to staff its

priesthood for generations. On this reading, the incidence of priestly same-sex abuse may simply reflect the proportion of priests attracted to

same-sex relations. The category of clerical child-sex abusers, whatever its extent, is likely to contain a higher percentage of same-sex abusers than might be expected in the general population.

“The gay priest in pursuit and maintenance of power finds himself in an almost Orwellian dilemma. He

covers up or denies evidence of the homosexuality he knows in his own body and soul for the sake of

protecting the power of the Catholic Church. But the church, by orchestrating a cover-up, has helped provoke the prejudice that he attempts to avoid. Same-sex abuse cases might, if made public, unmask the staggering hypocrisy of the church’s stand on homosexuality – or indeed, almost any kind of sexuality.”

A number of ex-priests who have contributed to the debate make the obvious point that the measure of liberation which gays have achieved in the last quarter century has made it possible for them to come out – in either or both senses of the phrase: out of the closet and/or out of the priesthood.

Does this not lead on to the thought that there must be less need now for gay adolescent males to seek futile sanctuary in the Church in the first place? Gay liberation must drastically have drained the pool of potential recruits to the priesthood. Isn’t this an obvious element in the decline in vocations which is currently the subject of intense discussion in the Catholic press?

The Pope and the Vatican house ideologists may well be right, then, that the changes in society which generated gay liberation have been a factor in bringing the Church to crisis point. But not in the sense in which they seem to understand it.

Thus, the response to the crisis of Monsignor Clark and the wider Church leadership is likely to prove somewhat counter-productive. To the extent that the Church becomes more homophobic, even as surrounding society adopts an increasingly rational attitude, the attraction of the Church to that section of Catholic maledom which has provided it with between 30 and 80 percent of its clergy will inevitably continue to decline, and at a more rapid rate than hitherto.

The Catholic hierarchy might care to ponder this conudrum.

Monsignor Clarke didn’t mention in his sermon that he first achieved prominence within the New York diocese as secretary to Cardinal Francis Spellman.

Spellman was archbishop of New York from 1939 until his death in 1967 and, during that time, one of the most powerful men in America. I have a picture of him in my memory blessing US warplanes before they set off for Vietnam and decribing American soldiers going out to slaughter Vietnamese as “warriors for Christ”. He was a personal friend and important ally of the Holocaust non-interventionist Pope Pius XII. Spellman was also one of the most sexually voracious homosexuals in the New York of his day, known as “Franny” to the many Broadway chorus boys, waifs and strays he managed to lure into his evil ambience. He worked hand-in-hand, probably literally, with the repulsive gay McCarthyite Roy Cohn in a serious of furious and destructive anti-communist, anti-liberal, anti-gay witch-hunts.

The Catholic Church, to this day, has managed, if not to strangle, at least to stifle the truth about Spellman. Two men much admired in Dublin society, former US ambassadors to Ireland, played roles in the cover-up.

Twenty years ago, a Wall Street Journal reporter, John Cooney, wrote a biography of Spellman, The American Pope, to be published by Times Books, the publishing arm of the New York Times. Having talked to many priests who had served under Spellman and to a number of his victims, Cooney included a four-page section on his subject’s sex life, concluding: “In New York’s clerical circles, Spellman’s sex life was a source of profound embarrassment and shame to many priests.”

When the New York Times, intending to promote its own book, put a reporter on to the story, a determined campaign was launched, headed by Monsignor Clark, to keep the facts from the faithful. Former Phoenix Park resident John Moore was sent by Clark and personally persuaded Times executive Sidney Gruson to spike the story. Meanwhile, Catholics in journalism and the publishing industry were mobilised to make their opposition to the book known. In the end, the intended four-page passage was reduced to: “For years rumors abounded about Cardinal Spellman being a homosexual. As a result, many felt – and continue to feel – that Spellman the public moralist may well have been a contradiction of the man of the flesh. Others within the Church and outside have steadfastly dismissed such claims. Finally to make an absolute statement about Spellman’s sexual activities is to invite an irresolvable debate and to deflect attention from his words and deeds.”

Not content with this evisceration, Moore, again at Clark’s instigation, was instrumental in persuading the Times to have his fellow former ambassador to Ireland, William Shannon, review the book. The review was vituperative, denouncing Cooney for bringing up Spellman’s sexuality at all: “Prurient interest in the sex lives of public figures serves no useful purpose.”

Now, all this time later, in these more enlightened days, the Catholic Church and Eugene Clark are still at it.

They are all still at it. There is no sign whatever, in Ireland, the US or anywhere else, including the Vatican, that the heart-sickening stories now tumbling out in profusion of the sexual savaging of children by priests has prompted repentance or persuaded the rulers of the Church to consider seriously what has brought them to this dreadful pass and what might be done to bring it to an end.

Their sole priority, as ever, is to defend their Church. To them, it may systematically and over generations violate decency and the innocence of children but will always itself remain inviolable. This is their core, defining and only immutable belief. I’ll say it again. The time is gone for discussion of what the Catholic Church should do, the time has come for discussion of what to do about the Catholic Church.