Sexual Disorder and the Priest as Image of Christ

Teresa Collett provides the following response to Michael Perry's question on the exclusion of homosexuals from the priesthood:

I am uncertain exactly what Michael means by a "sin against the Gospel," but I assume he means something like the definition of sin given by section 1849 of the Catechism: "an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods."

Assuming we have a shared definition of sin, I think the Church would be justified in adopting a policy of excluding men who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward men from ordination to the priesthood because of the nature and function of the ministerial priesthood, which is to act in the person of Christ in the sacrifice of the Mass and in proclaiming Christ's mystery.

While all of us, and therefore every candidate for ordination, will be subject to various temptations (Romans 3:23), the question is whether the Church is justified in seeing disordered sexual desires as grounds for disqualification from ordination. John Paul II has advanced our understanding of how our sexual nature images God in much of his writing, but perhaps most particularly in his book, "Love and Responsibility". While this text primarily focuses on the nature of married love, it provides a deep understanding of the nature of human sexual identity properly ordered. The priest who is to image Christ to his parish, and be a father to his parishioners must have a rightly ordered sense of the gift of generative partnership that is sexual love.

Compounding the theological difficulty of a priest who has an exclusive homosexual orientation, is the practical problems that confront all of us in living a chaste life in contemporary society. By making the choice to live in accordance with God's law for our lives, we should order our lives to avoid occasions of sin. For a man entering the priesthood, his living conditions may (like those of the military) be "spartan, primitive, and characterized by forced intimacy with little or no privacy." It is both unwise and sinful to place people in positions of temptation.