Former Catholic Theologian Says Much of the Priesthood is Gay

Self-loathing closet cases are a menace both to themselves and to the larger LGBT population as many of the closet cases - I would suggest Peter LaBarbera, Robert Knight, Matt Barber as examples among the professional Christian set - transfer their own self-hatred to gays who have accepted their God given sexuality. No place does this seem more the case than amongst the Roman Catholic priesthood where I suspect many gays took refuge so that they could attempt to avoid expectations of marriage and perhaps try to pray away their same sex attractions. Ultimately, the attempt doesn't work as planned and great efforts are made to denigrate those who have accepted what these in some ways pitiful men refuse to accept within themselves. In my view, one is not hysterically anti-gay unless something more is going on with the individual. This holds for politicians (like former Congressman Ed Schrock), professional Christians and the Catholic Church (and probably Mormon Church) hierarchy. A German former Catholic theologian has a new book out that seems to validate my thoughts on this behavior. Here are highlights from The Localde:
*
Theologian David Berger, was correspondent professor for the Pontifical Academy of St Thomas Aquinas in the Vatican, where he said his academic work was watched and censored where it concerned homosexuality.
*
As a gay man himself, he told Der Spiegel in an interview that living among the Catholic homophobia was a nightmare. “It must be acknowledged that a large number of Catholic clerics and trainee priests in Europe and the United States are homosexually-inclined,” he said.
*
“The worst homophobia in the Catholic Church comes from homophile priests, who are desperately fighting their own sexuality,” he said. “Obviously, those who follow their urges are repudiated more fiercely when one is so painfully repressing that disposition oneself.”
*
Now working as a teacher in Cologne, Berger outed himself as gay this April after the Bishop of Essen Franz-Josepf Overbeck described homosexuality as perverse and a sin during an appearance on a television chat show. Berger’s book about his experiences within the Church The holy illusion – a gay theologian in the Catholic Church which is published this week.