The Priesthood and Homosexuality. A Basis to Dialogue

Bernard Kennedy

Issue 377, vol.95, Spring 2006

 “What is never helpful is to apply one culturally determined understanding to an entirely different culture…This article will try to highlight the present cultural understanding of the Subject of homosexuality”.

 “The biblical caution we read in the Old Testament Genesis story about homosexuality cannot be extracted as a singular injunction without considering the remaining section of the text…It was only in recent history that slavery was condemned and thus the understanding of the scriptural text [supporting slavery] contextualised”.

 “Freud (1910) writes of our sexual identity as being both bisexual and polymorphously perverse and adds that we are a concatenation of identifications”…Freud “never sees homosexuality as pathology and it was partly this realisation that eventually persuaded the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to remove it from such classification”.

 “To speak of a cure for homosexuality is to ignore the fact of the unconscious formation of heterosexuality and homosexuality…It is to suggest the orthodoxy of heterosexuality. Both heterosexuality, homosexuality, priesthood, and any life choice, are symptoms of a need in the individual resulting from an object loss at the time of Subject formation…The psychic formation of the heterosexual and homosexual identity cannot be reversed as identity is not a given at birth as if a psychic lineage”.

 “The problem behind this approach is one of distrust of sexuality in itself, and the defence of procreation as primary. This is because its sublimation is necessary to the emergence of higher aims of non-genital sublimated love, which includes religion”.

 “The general feeling among Christian, Jewish and Muslim homosexuals is that they are not welcome, as themselves, within any of the monotheistic faiths…As far back as the eleventh century Pope Leo IX (1048-54) refused pressure to expel gay clergy and issued instead the encyclical Nos Humanius agentes. The same thread can be seen in the Vatican Statement (1992) condemning discrimination against homosexuals. In the light of such negative reactions, mentioned above, and later, this message could be more widely dispersed especially among those groups, which so readily defend publicly the Church’s sexual morality. The message is very relevant today, with the increase in the violence against homosexuals in school and societies…It should never be possible to receive legitimacy for such violence from a faith statement”.

Bernard Kennedy is a Priest of the Dublin Diocese, a Poet and a Psychoanalyst. He holds an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies and an MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. He has written for various religious and Psychoanalytic Journals and is a Member of the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy of Ireland.