Former Catholic priest Christopher Schiavone

DATE January 2, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Christopher Schiavone discusses the time he spent as a
gay priest in the Catholic Church
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

As a celibate priest who is also a closeted gay man, Christopher Schiavone
concealed the full truth of his identity from his superiors, his family,
even
himself. He says that in his eight years in the seminary, and his eight
years
as a priest, he never actively denied being homosexual, but he didn't
volunteer the information to others and made no effort to correct those who
assumed he was straight. In 1984, Schiavone was a member of the first class
of Boston seminarians ordained by Cardinal Bernard Law. Schiavone left the
priesthood in 1992 after having an intimate relationship with a 26-year-old
seminarian while Schiavone was the dean of students. He now heads his own
marketing firm in Boston. Last month, he wrote an article in the Boston
Globe
Magazine about his experiences as a gay priest. I recorded this interview
with him last week.

How did knowing that you were gay figure into your decision to become a
priest?

Mr. CHRISTOPHER SCHIAVONE: Wow, that's a difficult question. I think on
the
one hand, my decision to become a priest had its own standing. It had its
own
integrity. I was very much attracted to the substance of the priesthood,
and
by that I mean the kind of work that priests did, the kind of life that
priests led in many respects. I mean, that was all very attractive to me.
In
a way, the whole business of being gay made priesthood something of a bonus.
I mean, an aspect of priesthood in the Catholic Church is celibacy, and I
reasoned as a teen-ager, certainly around the time I was entering the
seminary, that if I was going to be celibate anyway, my sexuality would
become
almost irrelevant. So I would say, you know, did my being gay figure into
my
decision to become a priest? Probably not directly? Did the element of
celibacy in the priesthood sort of add a certain attraction to it? Yeah,
positively, 'cause it made me think here was a good and respectable way I
would live my life that would never require me to go public with my
sexuality.

GROSS: Did you feel guilty entering the priesthood knowing that you were
gay
and knowing that the church disapproved of homosexuality and that if you had
admitted that you had a gay sexual orientation you probably wouldn't have
been
welcomed into the priesthood?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: You know, Terry, at the very beginning I did not feel
guilty.
As I understood it, the church's teaching on homosexuality was this: The
condition of being homosexual, or homosexually attracted, from the church's
point of view, was anywhere between sort of morally neutral and maybe
slightly
problematic from a moral point of view. But as long as you never acted on
it,
you know, as long as you never had a sexual relationship with another person
of the same gender, you were OK.

So I think when I entered the seminary knowing that I was homosexual, I sort
of processed what I knew about the church's teaching and said, `Well, OK,
I'm
not sexually active and I'm about to dedicate my life to something that is
very good and very worthwhile, so there's nothing to feel guilty about.'

GROSS: You say one of the reasons why you entered the priesthood is that
you
didn't really want to face your homosexuality or act on it and you thought
that it would be pretty irrelevant if you became a celibate priest, but the
longer you were a priest the harder it was to deal with the vow of celibacy.
I'm wondering what the impact was early on of celibacy on your feelings
about
your own homosexuality. How much did the vow of celibacy help put your own
sexual orientation aside?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Oh, I think it played a very large role in enabling me to
sort
of run away from my own sexual orientation. I think that sort of the ideal
and the objective for a celibate man is to live a life of service in the
church without entering into any relationships which could in any way become
sort of sexually expressive. And, you know, as long as I was working hard
to
do that, it was easy for me to--I don't know if forget is quite the right
word but certainly to stop paying attention to the pattern of my own sexual
attractions. But, you know, it really was--you know, I think it was
ill-fated
from the start because, I mean, you know, one of the things that I think any
person who has been in the seminary will tell you is that, you know, the
seminary environment is a fairly intense environment from a social point of
view, and in the course of your time in the seminary you develop
relationships
and friendships with people which are a great source of solace and growing
self-awareness and so on.

Well, if you're a gay man and you're in an institution like a seminary with
other gay men, it's almost inevitable that one or another or several of
those
relationships over time are going to become not only intimate from a sort of
plutonic friendship point of view but also from a sexual point of view. And
then all bets are off. I mean, then, you know, this environment, which
seemed
to offer some sort of comfort and relief from the struggle of being a gay
man
now actually becomes a hothouse. You know, it becomes an environment where
you're facing your own sexual urges and your own sexual orientation more
sharply than you ever expected.

GROSS: Well, do you think that there was a gay subculture within the
seminary
or, you know, within the priesthood?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: You know, I went to St. John's Seminary here in Boston, the
major diocese and seminary. I don't know how typical it is of other
seminaries across the country. My suspicion is that it's rather typical.
And
certainly at St. John's there was a thriving gay subculture. By thriving
gay
subculture, what I mean is it was sort of a secret environment that would
create itself whenever two or three or four men were together in the same
room, all of whom, you know, knowing that the other people in the room were
also gay, felt free to begin to sort of express themselves in, you know,
some
of the ways that are stereotypical of gay men. So there was a lot of sort
of
campy, bitchy humor. You know, we had women's names, you know, for each
other
and for some of our faculty members. It was kind of funny, in a way. I
mean,
you know, it was--you know, the banter that went on among men in the
seminary
who knew each other to be homosexual was not, you know, all that different,
you know, than the banter that goes on between Will and Jack on "Will and
Grace."

But that having been said, it has to be noted that it was a decidedly secret
kind of thing, and everyone who functioned within that subculture knew that
it
was important not to let this be known or seen too widely.

GROSS: How did you find each other? Obviously not at the gay bar.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Well, you know, it's funny that you say that, because at St.
John's there was actually an on-campus pub, you know, sort of like a
privately
run room where you could get wine or beer late at night and, you know,
unwind
and so on. And it wasn't until I was, you know, a long time out of the
seminary or the priesthood that it really became clear to me how much that
place was like a gay bar and, you know, like a gay bar in that, you know,

it's a group of men in a dark room at night--in the case of the seminary
pub--many of whom were homosexual and, you know, there was a lot of
posturing.
There was a lot of preening. There was a lot of, you know, checking other
people out. You know, it was not incredibly overt, but, you know, there
certainly was a sexual energy about it that I think maybe some of us would
have denied while we were there, but I have to say in retrospect, you know,
it
certainly was there.

The other thing that would happen--this was my experience, Terry, and I know
it was the experience of many of the men that I went to the seminary
with--you
know, vacations were often the opportunity to explore this side of your own
being and your own identity, so it was not unusual for a group of
seminarians,
or subsequently a group of priests, to go on holiday in a city or to a
destination at a significant distance from your home turf and, you know, go
into gay bars. Reading the local gay papers, whatever, in that destination,
wherever it might be, was sort of--it was a way to sort of vicariously
experience the life of an openly gay man without ever being found out and
without stepping too far, you know, outside of the permissible boundaries.

GROSS: My guest is Christopher Schiavone, a gay man and former priest.
We'll
talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Chris Schiavone, a gay man who was a priest from 1984 to
1992.

Now you were talking about a gay subculture within the seminary. Since
there
was a group of you who, whether you talked about it overtly or not, knew you
were all gay, you communicated in a covert way about that. But were there
times when gay men within the seminary actually made an advance on you, you
know, a sexual advance? And if that happened, did you have to decide not
only
whether to actually have a relationship, but also if not whether to tell on
them, to report them.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Yeah. My first experience with that, Terry, was when I was
a
freshman in the seminary college, and an older student, a student who was
probably a senior when I was a freshman, approached me late one evening--I
think it was probably after a house party--and, you know, I've often thought
to
myself, you know, `What would my reaction have been if this had been a
student
that I was actually attracted to?' In point of fact, I wasn't attracted to
him. He wasn't at all interesting to me in that respect, so it was very
easy
for me to say to him, `You know, this just isn't something I'm interested
in,'
and I kind of let it go.

The same thing happened to me again a year later with another student, and
this time I was more disturbed by it. In retrospect, I think the reason I
was
more disturbed by it is that it was forcing me to look at myself. I mean,
he
wasn't particularly--there was nothing about his behavior that was, you
know,
rude or predatory. I mean, it's the kind of thing which, you know, if it
happened to you as an out gay man when you were in a gay bar you wouldn't
think twice about, but there was something about it in this environment that
kind of set me to thinking. So I went to see my spiritual director to talk
about it, and this particular spiritual director was--I think to call him
homophobic is probably polite. He was the kind of guy who, you know, the
second he even, you know, sensed the slightest whiff of homosexuality was on
the warpath.

He urged me very strongly to turn both of these men--both the person who had
made this advance toward me the first year and the one that made it the
second
year--into the rector and to do so anonymously. And, you know, I did what
he
recommended, and it's something about which I still feel a certain amount of
guilt. It was the wrong thing to do. Even if I was going it on the advice
of
a spiritual director who I saw as something of a teacher or a mentor, it was
the wrong thing to do. I mean, at age 18, 19 or 20, a young man ought to be
able to handle himself, and the concept of reporting someone anonymously to
the rector to me now is just appalling. But it is what I did, and it's what
we were encouraged to do and it's what many people did.

GROSS: What happened to the person who you reported?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: They were both expelled. I'd say probably within a month of
turning those students in, both of them were expelled. But that experience
that I just described, you know, it was not at all uncommon. And, you know,
I
think in a weird way, Terry, for me, you know, the benefit of turning those
two men in within in the context of the seminary system was that it sort of
established my own if not heterosexual credentials at least my homophobic
credentials, which...

GROSS: And that was a good thing.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Oh, if you wanted to get a positive vote...

GROSS: Right.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: ...from the seminary faculty, absolutely.

GROSS: In an article that you wrote in the Boston Globe, you refer to a
time
when you wrote a letter to another priest, and the letter was discovered
ripped up, I think, in his wastepaper basket...

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Yes.

GROSS: ...and it was traced back to you?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Yes. Yeah, that was actually after I was already ordained.
I
had been ordained at this point for a couple of years. I was, at this time,
studying, do graduate studies, at Georgetown in Washington, and philosophy.
I
was being prepared to come back and teach on the seminary faculty myself.
And
during the time that I was there, I corresponded with many of my friends
back
at home, especially with this one man, who was probably my closest priest
friend.

One afternoon, I was sitting in my room in Washington working on a paper on
something very obscure like the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas or something
like that, and the phone rang and it was Bishop Banks who, at the time, was
second in command in the archdiocese of Boston under Cardinal Law, and he
said, `Chris, this is Bob Banks. I need you to come home.' I said, `Excuse
me?' He said, `I need you to come home. I need you to take the next plane
that you can get to Boston. I need to see you urgently.'

So I had no idea at this point, Terry, what this was about, but I knew it
wasn't good if I was being called home that way. So I presented myself at
the
chancery in Brighton and sat across a table from him, and he opened up a
folder and began to lay out, one by one, Xerox pages of a letter that I had
written. He said, `Well, I need to know whether these letters are yours,
because if they are yours, they're evidence that you are a practicing
homosexual.' And he said it sort of in that tone of voice. And the more he
pushed it, the more resistant I became. I never said they weren't mine, but
I
refused to answer his questions at all. His message to me was that, you
know,
no matter what happened here, he couldn't see how I could possibly be placed
on the faculty of the seminary, that I would pose a danger to myself and to

others and that he wanted to see this addressed. And if I wasn't willing to
own up to these letters, he would call in a handwriting specialist to prove
me
the author of them.

GROSS: So what was the outcome?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: What happened was I immediately called up other people that
I
knew sort of within the diocesan hierarchy to seek their counsel and their
advice, and everyone agreed that the best way to handle this was to send me
and my letters to a psychiatrist and psychologist for a psychological
evaluation. The first evaluation that was ordered up they had performed in
Washington by a personal friend of Bishop Banks. I at the time, you know,
Terry, was filled with so much indignation and so much shame I didn't really
advocate very well for myself, so I just sort of said, `OK, I'll see whoever
you want me to see.'

This duo, this psychiatrist and psychologist, came back with a psychological
report that said, among other things, that I had a problem with gender
identity confusion, which, when I think about it now actually makes me
laugh,
you know, because if I think of all of my psychological challenges in life,
gender identity confusion is not one of them. But, you see, these were sort
of old-school folks who read, you know, a letter from one gay man to another
that saw references, the use of women's names. You know, `What about Mary?
Isn't she a trip?' you know, to refer to some priest. And they thought that
this was a sign that there was some sort of deep, you know, dark secret, you
know, about my gender.

GROSS: You really wanted to be a woman.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Exactly.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Yeah, exactly.

GROSS: Right. They were kind of clueless about what the subculture was
really about.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: They did not get it.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: They did not get the joke.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: So that...

GROSS: Well, but they didn't realize that you were gay then. So did that
absolve you from the gay issue?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Well, no, because then what happened was this psychological
report was so shocking, even to them, that I was able to convince them to
send
me to another mental health professional in the Boston area for more testing
and another evaluation, which came...

GROSS: And they said what?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: And they said, you know, the first wave of tests were
obviously, you know, absurd and there can't be--and they evaluated the
letters, you know, and they--this particular psychologist sort of, you know,
glossed over it, saying, you know, `I don't really see anything sinister in
these letters except a little bit of immaturity, and Chris would certainly
benefit from some, you know, psychotherapy, as all of us would at some point
in our lives, and I'd be very happy to work with him.' And, in fact, they
did
begin to work with this psychiatrist in Boston. I came back from
Washington,
I finished my graduate work here at home while I was in therapy, and inside
of
about a year, this particular psychiatrist felt that he was in the position
to
give me a clean bill of psychological health and indicated that I was, you
know, certainly suitable for any ministry that the diocese should assign me
to.

GROSS: Christopher Schiavone. We'll talk more about his life as a gay man
in
the church in the second half of the show. He was a priest from 1984 to '92
and now runs his own marketing company in Boston.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, undergoing therapy, coming out as a gay man and leaving
the
priesthood--we continue our conversation with Chris Schiavone about his
eight
years as a Catholic priest.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Christopher
Schiavone.
He was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1984. He knew he was gay when he
entered the seminary eight years earlier, but he thought celibacy would make
his orientation irrelevant. Schiavone left the priesthood in 1992. He now
runs his own marketing company in Boston.

After having remained celibate, you eventually had an affair with a
seminarian
while you were dean of students at this seminary. And you wrote about this
a
little bit in your Boston Globe magazine article. You were 32 at the time;
he
was 26. What was it about this relationship that made you give into your
feelings, whereas I think until that point you had kept that vow of
celibacy?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Well, the way you've asked the question, you know, what is
it
about this relationship that made me give in to the feelings this time,
would
make it seem that I had somehow made a conscious decision here, and I don't
know that it really was a conscious decision. I think that I was so
overcome
by the emotion of the situation and I was so vulnerable because by this
point
in my priesthood, I was, you know, sort of tired, lonely, sort of riven with
self-doubt. So that by that time this guy came across my path, you know,
it's
not so much a decision I made, it's just something that happened almost.
You
know, I sort of fell into it.

GROSS: And it's someone who you knew well and really cared for.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Yeah. I mean, he was a student. I mean, he was an adult
seminarian. You know, many of the students I worked with at St. John's were
recent high school graduates. This was a guy who'd been out in the world.
He'd even himself been married for a couple of years when he had been in the
military. You know, so sort of just on a human level, I immediately hit it
off with him. And then in the course of his first year at the seminary, he
became quite ill, and I found myself in the situation where I was working
extremely closely with him and with his family. And something of a very
genuine, you know, and intimate friendship developed between the two of us.
And it was in that context that some of these sexual feelings began to well
up.

GROSS: Once you actually had a physical relationship, did you or he feel
the
need to confess about it, or were you discovered?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: What happened was that, you know, it's one of those events
in
life where you do something or something happens to you and almost in an
instant you know your life has been changed forever...

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: ...you know, and both of us had that sense almost
immediately,
though I think we both had a hard time talking about it. We did try to talk
about it a little bit with each other over the--there was a single incident,
and we talked with each other a little bit about it over the couple of weeks
that followed it. Both of us were very uncomfortable. Both of us were very
uneasy.

It became clear in my conversations with him that he was about to go to
someone in authority in the seminary to talk about it, because he just
couldn't handle it alone anymore. And I was really ambivalent about it
because on the one hand, I didn't want it to happen that way. I didn't want
to be reported or turned in. And on the other hand, Terry, I almost felt
relieved, like, you know, finally this travesty is going to come to an end.
I
have no idea where it's going, but finally it's going to end.

And as far as I know, almost simultaneously he and I contacted the rector of
the seminary to ask to meet with him. And, you know, the purpose of his
meeting with the rector was to tell him, you know--I supposed in a certain
sense to turn me in. The purpose of my meeting with the rector was to
confess, I mean, just to go in and say, you know, `You may or may not
already
know this, but I'm here to tell you something that is really hard for me to
tell you.'

I had friends at the time who said to me, you know, `Are you insane?' you
know, `Let him go and talk to the rector and deny it.' You know, `No one
else
was there, no one else will know, you know, if he's telling the truth. And,
you know, you can save your priesthood and save your position.' But, you
know, I think at that stage of the game in my life, I was so tired of the
hiding and of the secrecy.

GROSS: Right. So when you went to the rector, what advice did you get?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Well...

GROSS: You went to confess that you were gay and that you'd acted on it?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Yeah. I mean, you know, I didn't so much get advice from
him
as I did a--he was very compassionate. The rector at the time was Timothy
Moran, and, you know, he was a relatively young man, you know, a
post-Vatican
II trained priest with, you know, I think a lot of human sensitivity and a
lot
of openness. And, you know, he worked very hard, you know, to let me know
that he respected my decision to tell him the truth and that even though it
was, you know, almost certain that I would have to resign my position at the
seminary, you know, he wanted me to know that he was going to give me
whatever
sort of human support that he could in the process.

He had little or nothing to say about the fact of my being gay. And, you
know, the thing about that incident, which to this day I think was the most
damaging was not that sex took place between two men. The thing that was so
damaging, the thing I've looked at and said, `This is what I really did
wrong
here,' is this was a real violation of professional boundaries. This was a
young man who was entrusted to my care as a member of the seminary faculty,
and as a priest I should have been able to handle myself in that
relationship,
and I wasn't.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: And that was wrong.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: You know? So I know that I needed to go at that point, to
leave the seminary faculty.

GROSS: So eventually you were sent to an institute for therapy, the South
Down Institute in Canada. Why were you sent there?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Well, I think there were two reasons. I mean, I think first
of all the church--this has certainly become clear in all of the press about
clergy sexual misconduct over the past year. I mean, the first thing that
the
church does whenever something like this happens is it gets the perpetrator,
you know, out of town as quickly as possible. You know, get them off the
stage, you know? So I think there was an element to that. I mean, sending
me
up to Toronto was sort of a way to get me out of the picture for a while so
that all the passions that might arise around this could die down.

The other reason was that I think that the church authorities recognized
that
I might value from this six-month period of time away, and that in some
sense
the therapies and treatments that were offered there might be useful to me.
I
think from a legal point of view, they need to show that they were
practicing
due diligence, you know, that the second they had become aware of a case of
sexual misconduct they had acted deliberately, not only removed the man from
office but also sent him away for treatment. So I think that's why I was
sent
there.

GROSS: And this is a center that specializes in treating priests.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Yes, priests and religious. I mean, I'd say the community
at
that time was, you know, half men and half women.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. And people are there for what kind of problems?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: A whole range of things. I mean, there were people there
who
were suffering from just burnout from, you know, many uninterrupted years of
ridiculously stressful ministry, people suffering from clinical depression,
people dealing with substance abuse issues, relapsing in efforts to recover
from alcoholism or drug abuse. I mean, it's just the full gamut. And then
there were people who were in situations similar to mine, the people who
were
there because of sexual misconduct. Some of them, it was sexual misconduct
with minors. More of us, it was not sexual misconduct with minors, it was
with, you know, consenting adults.

GROSS: What kind of advice did you get from the therapists there about
reckoning with your own sexual orientation?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: South Down was, and I think continues to be, you know,
extremely reputable from sort of a mental health point of view, and
progressive. And, I mean, I think they espouse the viewpoint toward
homosexuality that almost any responsible mental health clinician does
nowadays. Homosexuality, per se, is not a mental illness of any kind,
though
a whole host of adjustment issues and psychological problems can swirl
around
it if the person is in shame about it or is in secrecy about it.

So their approach to working with me was to help me to come to sort of a
fuller acceptance of my own identity as a gay man and to learn to accept
responsibility for the violation of professional boundaries which put me in
that place to begin with, so that no matter what I did, you know, whether I
were to return to ministry or leave the church and do something else in
life,
they wanted to sort of equip me or help me get myself equipped so that my
sexuality would be mature, that I wouldn't be so vulnerable, you know, and
so
out of control that I would wind up violating professional boundaries, you
know, to pursue my own sexual gratification.

GROSS: Was it your decision to accept that you were gay and leave the
priesthood or were you told you had to leave the priesthood?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: It was very much my decision. I actually had come to the
conclusion personally even before I arrived at South Down. Part of me even
didn't want to go there, Terry. I was, like, you know, `It's clear to me
that
being gay and being closeted in the priesthood isn't working. I need to
leave
now,' you know? The therapists there at South Down and other friends of
mine
said, `You know, maybe that's true, maybe it's not. Why don't you just give
yourself the six months to figure this thing out, and then if you still feel
the same way, go.'

So at the end of my time at South Down, I had pretty much confirmed for
myself
a decision that was already taking shape inside of me. One, that I needed
to
come out as a gay man. By coming out, I mean come out to my family and my
friends, and sort of live publicly as gay. And, two, that I needed to leave
priestly ministry, that it just wasn't healthy for me. You know, even if
the
diocese was going to go back to ministry, it wasn't healthy for me to stay
there because I was constantly putting myself in a situation where I was
acting as a public spokesperson for an institution that, you know, sort of
commits the active homosexual to eternal damnation. I mean, how
self-loathing
can that be?

So I had come to that decision, and toward the end of my time there, you
have
sort of an exit interview that's sort of moderated by your primary
therapist,
and on the other end of the line is the diocesan official who's responsible
for you. And in my case, it was Father--now Bishop--John McCormack, who's
the
bishop of Manchester in New Hampshire now. And I sort of launched into my
little, you know, sort of prepared spiel. I had thought a lot about what I
wanted to say to him and I accepted responsibility for my failure and the
violation of professional boundaries.

And I said, you know, `John, it's just become really clear to me in my time
here I am, in fact, gay and, you know, the priesthood is not going to be the
most healthy place for me to live as a gay man, so I'm going to ask for a
leave from ministry and, you know, pursue my own growth and healing
elsewhere.'

And it was almost as if he didn't hear me because he immediately shot back,
`You know, Chris, good thing that you got something out of this program,
but,
you know, you've got to know you've been a disgrace to your family, a
disgrace
to the church and the seminary. You've ruined a great career for yourself.
And I need for you to know even if you wanted to come back, there's no
ministry for you in the Archdiocese of Boston or anywhere, you know. You
just
won't be permitted.'

And I was sort of--I don't know, I was shell-shocked, you know. It's sort
of
the classic case of the employee who goes in to quit and is told by the
boss,
you know, `Don't bother, you've just been fired.' I mean, it's just
shocking,
you know? So did I decide--going back to your original question, did I
decide
it on my own? Yes. Could I have returned to ministry in the Archdiocese of
Boston if I wanted to? I don't think so. I think I would have been
blocked.

GROSS: My guest is Christopher Schiavone, a gay man and former priest.
We'll
talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Chris Schiavone. He's a gay man who was a priest from
1984 to 1992.

Chris, it sounds like the six months you spent in therapy after you
acknowledged that you were gay were very useful in gaining an understanding
of
yourself as a gay man. You decided for sure to leave the church; at the
same
time, the church decided to have you leave.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Right.

GROSS: You know, so here you were, outside of the church now, and then I
imagine you had to figure out how to deal with being gay as a sexual
being...

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Yeah.

GROSS: ...not as a person who had to honor vows of celibacy. And that must
have been a very challenging, in its own way, situation.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Yeah, it was very much and, I mean, I think it continues to
be. I mean, you know, I'm certainly better off now than I was then, if for
no
other reason than I'm living my life in sort of openness and no longer in
secrecy and with a lot of love and support from, you know, family and from

friends.

On the other hand, you know, learning how to live a healthy life as a gay
man
has not been an easy thing to do, partially because I think in that whole
time
that I was in the seminary, in the priesthood, I think a lot of the stuff
that
my counterparts who were gay but in other lifestyles, a lot of the things
they
went through in terms of dating and experimentation and so on I did not go
through. So I had to sort of make up for lost time, in a way.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: And sometimes--and to be frank, some of it--it's been
discouraging. You know, I feel, you know, like I'm maybe 10 years behind in
some respects. On the other hand, I feel like I bring to, you know, my life
as a gay man now and to the relationships that I have and have had a kind of
experience that's hard to duplicate. You know, the experiences that I had
as
a priest weren't all bad, you know. There were many incredible things that
I
learned and experienced as a priest that I think that I bring to my life as
a
gay man now. So, I mean, yeah, it was difficult. It has been difficult.

GROSS: Well, you know, one of the things you had to reconcile as a priest
was
if you knew that you were gay, how can you be the voice of a church that has
no tolerance of homosexuality? Well, now that you're not longer a
practicing
priest, the church still has that same intolerance of homosexuality. You
are
now an out gay man. Do you feel comfortable as a practicing Catholic? Can
you--I mean, how do you reconcile that? Do you ignore what the hierarchy's
saying and make your own peace with the religion?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Well, I don't. I mean--no. That's a great question,
because
in the first several years after I left ministry, I did regularly attend
Catholic Mass. I was part of a Jesuit community, a parish community here in
the Boston area, wonderful liturgy, good preaching, welcoming community.
But
there did come a moment about three or four years into my time as a member
of
that parish community where I just couldn't continue to do it because I
realized--and I can't make judgments about anyone else here, but for me to
continue to worship there every Sunday knowing full well that the church's
official position on homosexuality hasn't changed one wit was very
difficult.

And it was a very progressive community. There were lots of gay men who
were
part of this community. It works very well for them; it does not work
especially well for me because I don't think that there is any glossing over
the fact that the church, from an official point of view, teaches the same
thing about homosexuality now that it did 10 years ago and 20 years ago,
namely that, you know, the homosexual orientation is gravely disordered,
even
if morally neutral, and that a person who chooses to act upon their
homosexual
inclinations, even within the context of a loving relationship with another
person of the same gender, risks the fires of hell. And I don't know,
there's
no way to gloss over that. I need to...

GROSS: So where does this leave your spiritual life?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Well, you know, it leads me in the direction of a search. I
mean, that's why I say I'm about as likely nowadays to be worshiping at the
local Unitarian church, which surprises some of my friends who know how
passionately Catholic I was. But at the very least, in a community like
that,
there is not the sort of level of judgment and this level sort of moral
servitude that you find in the Catholic Church.

I think what I'm still searching for in spirituality is a community in which
that spirituality can be celebrated sort of openly and joyfully, where
sexuality is not seen as an obstacle to one's relationship with God and
community, but is seen as sort of an integral part of who you are, to be
celebrated in the face of God as much as any other part of who we are. And
I
guess that's what I'm still looking for.

GROSS: My guest is Christopher Schiavone, a gay man and former priest.
More

after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest, Christopher Schiavone, is a gay man who was a priest from
1984 to '92. He was ordained in Boston.

What are your thoughts--you're in Boston and you were ordained in Boston.
Boston's your home. What are your thoughts looking at the state of the
Catholic Church now in Boston? It's been one of the centers of the sex
abuse
scandals. The church is bankrupt. Cardinal Law has left. I mean,
it's--what
do you think about when you see the position of the church now?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Well, you know, my first reaction is not a thought, it's
really a feeling, and the feeling is very profound sadness, and it's sadness
on two counts. I mean, first of all, you know, I was in Cardinal Law's
first
ordination class. He came to Boston in 1984, and I can recall when he
arrived
here he was relatively young for a bishop of a diocese this size and he was
vital and energetic and seemed to be bright and positive and so on. So he
came here with so much promise and so much hope. And to see a man like
this,
you know, lead himself really into the position were he had to step down is
very sad.

What's sadder still is this just sort of constant, constant procession of
revelations about the extent of sexual abuse of children that took place in
this diocese over the past 30 or 40 years, and the Herculean efforts that
bishops like Cardinal Law and his associates made to cover up these cases.
I
mean, one of the things that happened since I published that article in the
Boston Globe magazine is that I received a number of letters from all
different kinds of people, among them families of these child abuse victims,
and they're the most heartbreaking things that you can read.

I mean, in the midst of all of this, you know, sort of institutional
disintegration that appears to be happening--the bankruptcy and the
resignation and so on--there's just this incredible train and trail of
sadness
and pain and alienation left both by the priests who abuse children and by
the
bishops and other leaders who continually covered up for them and reassigned
them. It's really sad and it's profoundly sad.

And I think that it is, at least in part, a result of sort of the culture of
secrecy and denial that I experienced as a gay man, you know. But I think
that sort of culture of secrecy and denial has other implications, and we've
seen them on a massive scale here in Boston.

GROSS: Since most of the minors who were sexually abused in the round of
scandals being examined now were boys, some people are using that as an
argument against condoning homosexuality among priests, you know, homosexual
orientation, because will that lead to more sexual abuse of boys? I wonder
what you'd say to that, what you'd say to somebody who said that.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Well, I have a couple of reactions to it. I mean, first of
all, I would say that it's important to note that there have been numerous
cases where the abuse victims were girls and not boys. The other thing that
I
think is more important, though, is to realize that there's no evidence to
suggest that there's an essential connection between homosexuality and
pedophilia so that, yes, it is true that in many of the cases we've become
aware of, the victims were young boys. It is incorrect to reason from that
that simply because a man is gay or homosexual that he's going to abuse
young
boys. In fact, the likelihood is greater that he won't. I mean, you know,
I
certainly did not--the, you know, many men that I knew in the seminary who I
knew to be gay I know with confidence did not abuse minors. So, you know,
it
doesn't follow.

I do think that the waters got muddied when, right in the middle of this
crisis here in Boston, Vatican officials went on record saying that it was
dangerous, maybe even risky, to ordain gay men to the priesthood. And
there's
a feeling among some clergy--I have had several conversations with some men
who are still in the clergy, who are still Catholic priests but are gay, who
feel the gay clergy are being scapegoated, in a sense, in order to deflect
attention from the bishops and others in authority who covered up for the
pedophiles. The church is now saying, `Well, really, the problem here is
gay
men in the priesthood, and what we really need to do is eliminate gay men
from
the priesthood.' And, you know, I can tell you with a great deal of
certitude
that that's not going to solve anything.

GROSS: Do you think that priests should be required, or if you were the
pope,
would you want to change that?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: I would definitely want to change it. Priests should not be
required to be celibate. There will always be a place in the church for
priests who do want to be and feel called to celibacy, but to make it a
mandatory requirement I think forces men who might not otherwise have the
aptitude for it to try to squeeze themselves into the mold because they're
so
deeply attracted to ministry.

GROSS: You're still going through something of a spiritual crisis, trying
to
find the right path for yourself as a gay man who no longer feels quite
comfortable within the Catholic Church. When you pray, do you still feel
like
you're praying to the same God?

Mr. SCHIAVONE: Yes, without question. God, as I understand God, is
consistent, reliable, you know, always there, always loving. It is sort of
my
understanding, my perceptions of God which I think have changed over time
and,
you know, certainly my perception of God is much larger, much more
welcoming,
much more embracing than it was when I was a young man entering the
seminary.

GROSS: Well, Chris Schiavone, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. SCHIAVONE: My pleasure, Terry. Thank you for inviting me.

GROSS: Christopher Schiavone was a priest from 1984 to '92. He now has his
own marketing company in Boston. He wrote an article about his experiences
as
a gay man in the church, which was published in the Boston Globe magazine.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross. We'll close with a track from the new reissue
"Theme
and Variations" by clarinetist and saxophonist John LaPorta. This is his
composition "Absentee," recorded in 1956.

(Soundbite of "Absentee")
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