Maybe the only thing less interesting than the Cheney sisters' stragetic, headline-grabbing "feud" -- what next, the Quayle sons bicker? -- is the sex lives of priests. But if you care, Michael Joseph Gross reports in the December issue of Vanity Fair on the secret gay clergy at the Vatican. The story begins with a cliche: a priest in a gay sauna in Rome. Gross writes:
"At the Vatican, a significant number of gay prelates and other gay clerics are in positions of great authority. They may not act as a collective but are aware of one another’s existence. And they inhabit a secretive netherworld, because homosexuality is officially condemned. Though the number of gay priests in general, and specifically among the Curia in Rome, is unknown, the proportion is much higher than in the general population. Between 20 and 60 percent of all Catholic priests are gay, according to one estimate cited by Donald B. Cozzens in his well-regarded The Changing Face of the Priesthood. For gay clerics at the Vatican, one fundamental condition of their power, and of their priesthood, is silence, at least in public, about who they really are.
"Clerics inhabit this silence in a variety of ways. A few keep their sexuality entirely private and adhere to the vow of celibacy. Many others quietly let themselves be known as gay to a limited degree, to some colleagues, or to some laypeople, or both; sometimes they remain celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way, perhaps the least common but certainly the most visible, involves living a double life..."
Read it all.
Oh, the church...there are more gays there than at a parade:))
Posted by: Jolly Roger | November 19, 2013 at 02:19 AM
I'm not intrigued by the article anywhere near as much as your comment about the staged "feud" of the Cheney sisters. I am probably being obtuse, but how could this possibly benefit them?
Posted by: James | November 19, 2013 at 08:22 AM