I’ve just come from a funeral Mass. It wasn’t someone I was close to, but someone whom I’ve known since boyhood, a kind and funny man. I was glad to pay my respects. And, as he was a lifelong member of a choir, they raised the roof in a poignant melodic tribute.

Since my teenage years, when I flipped from being a daily Lenten Mass-goer to someone who hated everything the Church stood for, after I heard the priest spout the papal bullshit about the “grave moral disorder” of homosexuality, I only darken the doors of a church when I’m a tourist, or when I am there for a wedding or a funeral. Hate, of course, is not indifference; the hater and the hated are still strongly connected.
As the first Mass I’ve attended in years got under way, I found my stomach clenching with tension, as I realised the subtle force of being in a congregation full of believers, and going against the tide; not blessing myself, not chanting the responses. Even though I know every word. To avoid seeming childish, I stood when everyone stood. However, refusing to kneel in Mass is especially awkward when the person right behind you kneels. I sensed her devotional fervour ripple through me as she echoed every word the priest said in a whispered moan, a mere few inches from my ears. I didn’t feel she was reproaching me, though, however hard I tried to detect it in her tone of voice, or imagined it in the impact of her plosive consonants on the hairs on the back of my neck.
The priest was a simple, well-meaning man, everything was formal, dignified, just as everyone there would have liked. When it came to the Eucharist, I was, as usual, impressed with the ritual of it, the theatre of it, how effective the structure of the Mass is, to invoke a sense of the numinous, a touch of magic.
But I wasn’t prepared for the sight of a trio of small portly women in their 50s, in well-worn plain suits and flowery blouses, emerging from behind the altar, trooping down the aisle, and busying themselves in the process of distributing the host. I’d not seen that before. It all felt a bit, well, protestant. Still, nobody else seemed to notice or care, and they handed out the round wafers with a sincere humble piety.
Religion works best for kind, simple people; by which I mean that kindness and simplicity are qualities I value highly, but which I often find impossible to manifest. People are generally happier if they believe in a formal religion, a codified value system, and are supported by a sense of community and belonging, that comes from sharing those values and beliefs.
However, I am beyond the pale when it comes to most religions, primarily because so many of them scapegoat the sexual, and demonize the queer. And none do so more clearly than Ratzinger’s Catholic Church.
Apart from the odd time over the years that I have had sex with Catholic priests while cruising, I haven’t had much personal contact with them. My political animal, however, is outraged at the Vatican anti-condom stance, which has been directly the cause of so many people contracting HIV and AIDS in the developing world. In Ireland, still, the local parish priest holds sway on many school governing boards, and so the church line on sex education (leave it to the family, don’t mention homosexuality or condoms) is often the rule, rather than the exception.
This causes untold grief and confusion among vulnerable teenagers, as well as putting them at serious risk of contracting HIV. Not to mention institutionalised child abuse and the attempts to cover it up, with which everyone is familiar. While acknowledging that, as in every profession, there are good and bad priests, my opinion of the institution remains severely critical, and I have little political respect for those who remain in it.
My period of being untroubled by priests has, however, come to end. Increasingly, I am coming into contact with them, or other men who share an equally devout Catholic faith. The route by which I am encountering them is, to me, a surprising one: my work as a psychotherapist, interested in queer sexuality.
Firstly, the trail-blazing Fr Bernard Lynch, the Irish-American priest, now a psychotherapist based in London, who shot across my bows years ago with his appearance on the Late Late Show, and his heart-wrenching lament for how the Catholic church was treating gay men with AIDS. In the last few years, at therapeutic conferences and workshops on gay/queer themes that I attended (or ran) in London, the Irish delegates would invariably include a priest or a nun. Back in Dublin, at a recent gathering of men invited to hear a gay American author and psychotherapist speak on couples therapy for gay men, it seemed that I was surrounded by priests, or former priests. An ancient unease in me thawed as the meeting went on, listening to the sensitivity and thoughtfulness of the contributions.
There I met Glen O’Brien for the first time, the pseudonymous editor of Coming Out: Irish Gay Experiences, who teased me that I “roasted” him in these pages for producing a coming out book where over half the stories were written with false names. Indeed, it was that 2003 book that opened my eyes to a profound aspect of Irish queer sexuality, how intrinsically it is bound up with the priesthood.
Or should that be vice versa? So many of the book’s contributors were religious, so many stories were not so much about declaring oneself publicly to be gay, but in coming to terms with a spiritual path that involved loving members of the same sex.
Trained as I was in godless England, the gay priest-psychotherapists that I met along the way were few and far between, and tended to be Protestant, and of course that meant that they were also, some of them, female. I am only beginning to digest the implications, however, of realising that many of my colleagues in Ireland who are gay therapists or counsellors are also (apparently celibate) Catholic priests. On a personal level, which is still quite painful, it seems that I have a dialogue to re-engage in with Catholicism, if I am to be part of a community that is interested in the mental and spiritual health of Irish gay people.
On a professional level, I would have serious concerns about the ethics of a devout Catholic therapist working with a gay man or lesbian as a client, never mind a priest. Unrepentant sexually active queers are sinners, and burn in the flames of hell, as Pope Benedict recently reassured us. If a Catholic priest doesn’t believe that, then why be one? There is little room for individual conscience in Catholicism; that’s the point. Even psychoanalysis is suspect in Catholicism. Rome, and only Rome, rules.
One of the ways in which I could envisage my concerns being assuaged is of course through dialogue, debate, discussion. I am open to acknowledging that there are many different ways for men to be intimate with each other, to make connections, that do not have to be sexual. Indeed I know that sex can be an obstacle to intimacy, and true soulmates are found regardless of sex. I know that the quality of sex often improves after a decent period of celibacy. But I also know that queer sex can be a route to transcendence and a deep connection with other men; I know that when on the crest of a sexual wave, I have felt at my most alive and most understanding of the complexity that is being a man. I know that some of the most soulful men I’ve ever met have been self-styled pervy pigs, who have raddled their bodies with sex, drugs and rock and roll, have every disease going, and every body modification imaginable to serve the pleasure principle. I know that some of the most frightened men I’ve ever met have been Catholics, crippled with shame, using their faith as a blunt instrument to batter down their sexual impulses.