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Monday, March 08, 1993 Page: 3A QUICK WORDS: GAY EX-PRIEST WON’T
ACCEPT CONDEMNATION
In the Bible, the great sin is inhospitality to strangers. Sodom and
Gomorrah didn’t have to do with homosexuality. Sodom and Gomorrah had to do
with inhospitalityJohn J. McNeill
Former Jesuit priest who is openly gay
Gay ex-priest won’t accept condemnation
Author and former Jesuit challenges papal view that Jesus disapproved of
homosexuality
By CHARLES H. BOGINO
Times Leader Staff Writer
WILKES-BARRE — Some of Jesus’ close friends were homosexuals, and many
biblical passages used to condemn gay relationships are misinterpreted, a
Roman Catholic priest who has run afoul of the church said Friday.
John J. McNeill, a former Jesuit and author of several books criticizing
the Catholic view of homosexual practice as a moral evil, cited Jesus’
friendship with Lazarus, an unmarried man, and the two women that made up his
“family” prove that if not approving of homosexuality, Jesus accepted it.
“I’m not saying Jesus was a homosexual, but I do think that Jesus’ family
of choice he liked to hang around with was gay,” said McNeill, an openly gay
man who is now a part-time professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York
and a private-practice psychotherapist.
“Jesus condemns many sins, but he never mentions homosexuality.”
McNeill, speaking to a respectful crowd in a packed hall at the First
Presbyterian Church on South Franklin Street, pointed to other passages — in
Genesis, Leviticus and Paul’s letters to the Christians in Rome — as often
incorrectly read Scripture.
“In the Bible, the great sin is inhospitality to strangers. Sodom and
Gomorrah didn’t have to do with homosexuality. Sodom and Gomorrah had to do
with inhospitality.”
While McNeill technically is still a priest, his Vatican-dictated expulsion
from the Society of Jesus essentially stripped McNeill of his ecclesiastical
license to preach.
While sexual attraction to members of the same sex in itself is not sinful,
homosexual acts are, according to Catholic teachings.
“Active homosexuality is morally indefensible and has been many times
forbidden in revelation and the teaching of the Church,” the Rev. John A.
Hardon writes in the Modern Catholic Dictionary.
In November 1975, Pope Paul VI approved a statement opposing sex between
members of the same gender. The document was issued by the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican agency that interprets and safeguards
Catholic thought.
Pope John Paul II has tolerated little dissent from traditional doctrine
and has used a former parish priest from Bavaria, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
to enforce orthodoxy.
McNeill was disciplined by Ratzinger’s agency after publication of “The
Church and the Homosexual,” ordering the priest to keep a lower profile.
However, McNeill remained active, co-founding a support group for gay and
lesbian Catholics called Dignity. In 1988, Ratzinger directed him to stop his
ministry to gay men and lesbians. He refused, and the Jesuits threw him out.
McNeill wasn’t the first.
In 1986, Ratzinger’s office stripped the Rev. Charles Curran from his
position as theologian at Catholic University because of Curran’s questioning
of papal teachings the Vatican calls infallible, such as those opposing birth
control.
McNeill said his and Curran’s criticisms of Catholic teachings are simply
opposition to fallible theology. Much of that teaching, insofar as
homosexuality is concerned, has hurt people, spiritually and mentally, he
said.
“What is bad psychology has to be bad theology,” he said.
Nevertheless, McNeill intends to remain a Catholic.
“I am a Roman Catholic through baptism and ordination, and I’m not going to
let them take that away from me,” he said. “I’m going to be a Roman Catholic
until the day I die.”
H
OMOSEXUALITY