Passion and the pulpit

Along the fault line that runs through society on issues involving homosexuality, those men who are gay priests—and there are thousands in Canada—are the most vulnerable of all. Vancouver's Don Dodman, 68 and now retired after 30 years in the priesthood, knows this from experience. Discretion is essential. Exposure is career-altering. And exile to a remote parish—or outright banishment—is not uncommon. But Dodman is one of just a few gay priests—Anglican and Catholic—who have decided that the decades of subterfuge, whatever the costs, need to end. He's well aware that in questioning the orthodoxy of silence about gays in the priesthood he and a few others are challenging the edifices of worldwide Catholicism and Anglicanism. Both churches today are caught in a squeeze between biblical literalism—which condemns sodomy—and 21st-century openness; both face the real prospect of fracturing over issues of homosexuality. This is no small thing. The conflict affects the country's two largest churches and half of all churchgoers in Canada.

Dodman grew up in a working-class East Vancouver family and sensed from his earliest days that he was—in his words—“a total freak”. He had crushes on male classmates. Small and unathletic, he was always the last kid chosen for playground teams. On his way to school, his violin case was a source of provocation; to taunts of “faggot!” he learned to dissemble. For years, he'd hoped that one day things would change, that his strange, unwanted feelings would go away. It was on an ocean voyage as a 17-year-old naval reservist that he first glimpsed a route of escape. On the bridge of the ship one night in the mid-Pacific—with the sky full of stars—he found himself overwhelmed by the vastness of space and felt the proximity of God. But although his youthful sense of spirituality soared during the weeks at sea, he could, on his return, see more clearly that—in contrast—his Vancouver life was one of despair. It was the late '50s: admitting one's homosexuality was taboo. “I had the feeling I was the only one on Earth who was gay,” he says. “I was totally alone. I had nothing, no one to relate to. There was, I believed, no chance of having a happy life. I wanted to be cured. I wanted to be normal. I wanted to die.”

At the age of 21, while singing Verdi's Requiem Mass in a combined Vancouver Symphony–UBC Choir performance, a Latin phrase in the libretto reverberated in his mind: Mors stupebit et natura, cum resurget creatura “Death and nature will surprise/behold the trembling sinners rise”). To Dodman, there was no place for a sinful homosexual in all of nature. He was, he realized, singing his own requiem. He went home, put a plastic bag over his head, hoping he could escape the demons, but as the oxygen decreased and the temperature within the bag grew unbearable, he had to admit that he didn't have the courage. He would have to find a way to live.

In a search for spiritual relief, he visited St. James Anglican Church on Vancouver's Cordova Street, and there—amid the smell from the coal-oil lanterns and the organ-filled ritual of Mass—he came to see how he might reconnect to those wonderful starry nights in the mid-Pacific and elude his private hell. He'd join the seminary and become an Anglican priest. “I figured I could say I was giving my life to God and be safe.” The church would be his sanctuary. No one would learn his unspeakable secret.

Although he quickly observed at UBC's Anglican Theological College (now the Vancouver School of Theology) that there were priests and other seminary students like him who were gay, Dodman hid his own homosexuality behind studiousness. He still hoped to be rid of his curse. “I thought at the time I could be cured,” he admits now. “Aversion therapy, maybe. Some kind of drugs. Surgery.” He asked a seminary counsellor if homosexuality could be cured. And the man answered bluntly, “Look. You can't be cured. This is your inclination. You've got to live your life with this.” Dodman then admitted to a closeted Vancouver priest that he was a homosexual and wondered about the wisdom of being ordained and the dangers to a gay priest of being outed. The man reassured him that there were lots of gay Anglican and Catholic priests. They were, in fact, everywhere. “You have to live with circumspection,” the man advised Dodman. “You have to be careful.” And then the priest blithely propositioned the young seminarian.

Biblical proscriptions against homosexuality are as ancient as Genesis. Just 19 verses into the Old Testament, a rain of fire and brimstone eradicates the people of Sodom. And according to Moses (Leviticus 20:13), the punishment for homosexual acts is death. Those who point today to such injunctions as reasons to exclude gays from priestly functions (or to disapprove of same-sex marriage) cherry-pick their biblical sanctions—as literalists regularly do—ignoring, say, Moses's directives on the importance of animal sacrifice, or the necessity of atonement for menstruation and masturbation.

They see—as many leaders within the Catholic and Anglican churches see—homosexuality as a choice.

The Vatican has recently gone on record as saying: “Homosexual acts are inherently infantile,” and against God's natural law. In November 2005—in Pope Benedict's first public instruction—he announced that homosexual acts were “objectively disordered” and that those who have deep-seated gay tendencies should not be allowed into seminaries or the priesthood.

The bishops of the Anglican Church face a worse quandary. A serious conflict within its congregation over the blessing of same-sex unions and the role of gays in the priesthood could prompt, at the international General Synod of Anglican bishops next year, a schism between Anglican conservatives, who see homosexual acts as evil, and Anglican reformers, who see biblical literalism as dangerous.

This international and important theological argument is centred, curiously, on Vancouver. That's because reformist Michael Ingham, Bishop of the Anglican New Westminster diocese, and the articulate rector of Vancouver's Christ Church Cathedral in the same jurisdiction, the Very Rev. Peter Elliott, are leaders of a worldwide ecclesiastical push toward accepting gays.

The fundamental problem for Catholic and Anglican church authorities in their effort to quash religious approval of homosexual behaviour is this: the gays are already inside. Just as in Dodman's case, thousands and thousands of homosexual men in North America have sought obscurity—despite the dangers—in the Catholic and Anglican priesthoods. They form a Trojan horse within the walls of their own churches. Research—from local retired and active Anglican priests to books such as James G. Wolf's 1989 Gay Priests (Harper & Row) and A. Richard Sipe's Celibacy in Crisis: A Secret World Revisited (Routledge), as well as Web sources such as ReligiousTolerance.org—indicates that at least 15 percent of Anglican priests are gay and, among Catholic priests and seminarians, the number is probably closer to 50 percent.

These figures do not, however, make it any easier today for gay priests, for they usually live closeted—amid lies and abstinence—afraid that their sexuality will one day betray them, or worse: a rumour or witch-hunt will force their expulsion.

Sixty-four-year-old Father Karl Clemens of Toronto knows the story well. He's the first Catholic priest in Canada to acknowledge that he's gay, and he can sympathize with the 5,000 or so other gay Catholic priests in this country who continue to live in silence, trapped by the old seminary adage: ‘Don't ask; don't tell.' These men fear for their careers and pensions. Gay liberation is a threat. For decades, Clemens, too, had pretended he wasn't gay, while all around him other gay Catholic priests hid or had clandestine homosexual affairs. But by the late '90s, Clemens says, while church officials denied that AIDS was a problem—or, worse, that it was killing priests—he came to understand that in the climate of widespread deceit and paranoia, the Catholic Church was failing the vulnerable gay men who needed spiritual help. To his mind, this was not Christian. He retired from his eastern Ontario parish and became the self-appointed and self-financed “Priest of Church Street”, ministering to the thousands of gays in downtown Toronto. He never announced he was gay, but authorities, including Toronto's archconservative Cardinal Ambrozic, knew. Why else would a priest choose to work on Church Street? For a while, he celebrated mass at a local Jesuit facility until the Cardinal prohibited him from doing that. And when he was found in a local Catholic hospital offering comfort to dying victims of AIDS, he was banished from there as well. It was only when Catholic authorities, hoping to drive him out of Toronto, tried to curtail his pension and health-care benefits, that Clemens hired a lawyer and fought back. He was not going to be run out of town.

“I'm a priest. But the church says gay activities are wrong, that people choose their sexuality like they choose a hat. It's pathetic! So they try to disqualify me from the priesthood for my sexuality,” he says after another day with his Toronto friends at the gay-friendly Java Jive coffee shop. “Every day I find gay Catholics who are rejecting the church because the Church rejects them. But the people here see me, a priest….and I validate them. It's okay being gay. A lot of gay people have gone a long time without a hug or a care. Their fathers have rejected them, maybe. Their families. Their church. They feel abandoned by God. As gays, I tell them, we can care for each other. I can't say mass. I can't have a church. I can't perform the rites. But I believe I'm walking in the footsteps of Jesus.”

To walk in the footsteps of Jesus, as every gay priest knows, is to put one's feet at times upon the Via Dolorosa, better known to the faithful as the Street of Sorrows or the Way of the Cross. It's the legendary path Jesus took on his last walk toward resurrection. As a young Anglican priest, it didn't take Dodman long to learn the vagaries of that hazardous transit. Although a gay Catholic priest could conceal his sexuality behind church-mandated unmarried celibacy, an Anglican priest who didn't marry was eyed with great suspicion and seldom would rise in the church's hierarchy. Some gay Anglican priests, Dodman knew, did marry, simply for the sake of appearances —deceiving their wives with homosexual affairs while honouring their bishops. Dodman refused this common charade.

Dodman makes it clear that, for the most part, his daily role in the priesthood and his sexual orientation did not come into conflict. In places like Burns Lake, B.C., and Schefferville, Quebec, wrapped in the Anglican cossack and an attitude of piety, he usually felt safe in his deception, letting the sleeping dogs of small-town innuendo lie. “It's like walking a tightrope,” he says. “I yearned for companionship. I was often lonely. But I had to be very, very careful.” He recalls the time in the early '70s when, as the new priest on the Blood Reserve outside Cardston, Alberta, he was invited to dinner at the home of a male acquaintance's parents. Somehow the topic of homosexuality came up. Seated at the kitchen table, the young man's father declared: “I don't understand. All this talk about homosexuals. I don't think there are that many. I don't think I've ever met one.” Under the table, Dodman felt fingers clutch his thigh and squeeze hard— as Dodman and his secret boyfriend fought the temptation to burst out laughing.

However, as regularly happens where matters of sexual propriety are concerned, betrayals occur, and the gay priest finds himself on the fateful Via Dolorosa again, victimized for nothing more than being a homosexual. In Dodman's experience, this has happened several times. On one occasion, while he was rector in St. Albert, Alberta, in the mid-'80s, word began circulating that Dodman was gay. A local mother confronted her university-age son about his friendship with Dodman and the young man confessed that, yes, they'd been intimate—once. The Bishop of Edmonton soon called. Although Dodman had done nothing wrong—the young man was an adult—the veil obscuring gays in the Anglican priesthood had been pulled aside, revealing the unwanted truth. Resignation was necessary and immediate. At Dodman's next posting in Alert Bay, his “crime” was in not making a pass at a local, unmarried female doctor. She began gossiping about Dodman's sexuality. For months, he lived in terror the rumour might spread. Finally, Dodman admitted to his bishop in Victoria that he was gay and distressed by the situation. The bishop wasn't bothered by the admission, but still… Departure seemed best.

For most people, it's impossible to understand what it means to spend one's life trapped in a profound lie. For a gay Christian priest, this necessity betrays one of his religion's central precepts: that the truth shall set you free. Yet, in Canada—as is happening worldwide—the Catholic and Anglican churches are in crisis because, in part, the ecclesiastical hierarchy insists on this conspiracy of lies. And only a few courageous priests—like 51 year-old Peter Elliott, rector of Vancouver's Christ Church Cathedral—refuse to cooperate in the deception. Elliott's rebellion began in the early '90s when Vancouver physician Peter Jepson-Young announced that he had AIDS and started sharing his last two years of life in a powerful televised chronicle, The Dr. Peter Diaries. The honesty of the account moved millions. In 2003, prompted in a real way by Jepson-Young's legacy of gay openness, the Anglican's New Westminster synod voted to give church blessings to same-sex unions, the first Anglican diocese in the world to take this stand. A firestorm ensued. Eight conservative local parishes quit the Vancouver-area's diocese, half of them pointedly joining the anti-gay Anglican Church of Rwanda. (In parts of Africa, such as Nigeria's northern states, homosexual activities are punishable by death.) The head of the world's 80 million Anglicans, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called the Vancouver vote divisive, suggesting that priests here reconsider their approval of blessing gay unions.

But in his 22 years as a priest, Elliott had seen enough. Seated today in Christ Church Cathedral, not far from the 13 photographs of stern men who have preceded him as rector, he says: “It's no longer okay to have a gay subculture in our church that hides in fear and secrecy because of our sexual identity. Most of the time we've been living in fear of being found out. Someone had to break the silence.” So in 2003, Elliott wrote a critical account of his life in hiding, titled The Story of a Gay Priest. And when asked by the editor what pseudonym he'd like to use, said: “Use my real name.” Then, determined not to yield to pressures from top Anglican officials to reconsider Vancouver's pro-gay stance, Elliott ran for the position as prolocutor—spokesman—for the Anglican Church of Canada. And won. The headline on the front page of the Vancouver Sun the next day read “Gay B.C. Priest Elected to Top Post in Church” If he wasn't out before, he sure was then. On the following Sunday, as he entered Christ Church to celebrate mass, he was greeted with a standing ovation from the congregation. Along with Dodman and Clemens, he'd become one of a dozen or so priests in the country challenging the rule of silence.

Says Elliott: “For years and years, I've felt like the keeper of the family secrets. I've seen at least 25 Anglican priests whose lives were unhappy because they were married to a woman…and were gay. They got married because they saw it as a solution to the ‘problem' of being gay…and necessary for advancement in the church. But their lives were weighed down with the deceptions. They'd have little dalliances on the side. It's so hurtful. They were living a lie.” As he speaks, his voice suddenly catches and silence fills the room. Then: “It often ends in alcoholism and divorce.”

From his vantage point in the bars and coffee shops of Toronto's Church Street, Karl Clemens is certain he's part of an important, new civil-rights battle—no different than the ones that blacks and women fought a few decades ago. As Catholic authorities in Rome promote today what some critics call a “witch-hunt” for gays in the priesthood, others—like Clemens—are compelled to speak out. In February this year, 19 Quebec Catholic priests published an open letter opposing the Pope's effort to rid seminaries and churches of actively gay men. A month later, 213 Catholic religious communities across Canada, representing 22,000 Catholic priests, nuns, and lay officials, joined in the protest, castigating their own bishops and Vatican authorities for their discrimination against marginalized people, including gay priests. Says Clemens of the rebellion: “This is just the beginning. The church has either to face the reality of what has been going on for centuries or lose a lot of people. Priests are tired of hiding in the darkness of silence and fear. Coming out's like…like a resurrection.”

However, top church authorities are unmoved. Father Michael Prieus, 66, an Ontario theologian and spokesman for the Catholic Church in Canada, compares gays to the blind or to alcoholics who—if they could see again or recognize their addiction—would gladly be cured and then, and only then, might be considered for acceptance into the priesthood. He admits in a phone interview from a seminary outside Toronto that it took the church 359 years to apologize to Galileo for forcing him to recant his 17th-century observation that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, but Prieus is certain the Catholic Church will never soften its attitude toward active gays in the priesthood.

And this despite the fact they're already there.

When Don Dodman left his posting at Alert Bay, he found himself back at the place his spiritual life started: Vancouver's St. James Anglican Church. But in the intervening 31 years, a lot had changed. It now stood in the middle of the city's burgeoning skid row. And a tide of religious fundamentalism was rising, with its emphasis on biblical literalism and its focus on salvation, not on service to the poor. Dodman says he could see Anglicanism heading for a dangerous, unmarked crossroad—where biblical tradition and modern relativism might collide. But unlike Elliott, he was not a crusader; he valued the meditative life. So in 1997, Dodman retired early from the priesthood. For a short while, he admits, he hoped to find a home for his love of the sacramental life in the Catholic priesthood. But it didn't take long to be disabused of that idea. He listened to a sermon at Vancouver's Holy Rosary Cathedral as the priest there—he's now gone—made derogatory comments about gays from the pulpit. Yet Dodman knew the priest was himself an active gay. He went to his local Catholic church, where the priest read a letter from B.C.'s archdiocese condemning same-sex marriages. A half dozen men in the church—but not Dodman—walked out. Of religions, he now says with a wicked laugh, “I'm off all of them!” He says he has seen too much hypocrisy. These days, holding his breviary—with its gold-edged pages and Latin prayers—he silently recites his own “daily office”, his own personal mass, just as Clemens does each day for himself in Toronto.

In early 2001, Dodman, perusing Internet personal ads for the first time, came upon the ApolloNetwork—with its hundreds of listings of young gay men looking for older companions. Scrolling through the messages, these words appeared:

A picture of thee
Gets a picture of me.

As a priest, he loved the word thee. He sent his own photo showing a handsome, white-haired man with a mischievous glint in his eyes. Devan Burnett, then 25 and living in Virginia, sent his photo back, and Dodman says he thought: “This guy's…lovely!” Through daily e-mails after that, and several visits by Burnett to Vancouver over the course of the next one-and-a-half years, the two discovered their being together was easy, and that the age difference wasn't an issue. (In fact, Burnett admits that seducing a priest had always been one of his erotic fantasies.) But a roadblock stood between them and their living together: immigration regulations prevented Burnett from moving to Canada. However, as coincidence would have it, British Columbia joined several other Canadian provinces the summer of 2003 in legalizing same-sex marriages. A few months later, Canada announced that—in the face of a series of Charter challenges—it, too, would amend its laws, sanctioning same-sex unions across the nation. The border was now open to gay spouses.

On New Year's Eve, 2003, in his West End apartment overlooking English Bay, Dodman and Burnett married. With an exchange of rings in a simple ceremony attended by nine guests, Dodman became the first gay priest in Canada to wed another man. People who know him say that Dodman has never been happier. He admits that it has taken him a long, long, time to accept himself and his homosexuality. But the decades of loneliness and lying are now over. He says his daily office each morning, plays his harpsichord, writes—with Burnett's help—his life story, A Priest's Tale: Memoirs of a Gay Priest, and waits for the coming earthquake that will, he believes, shake the Anglican and Catholic churches to their foundations as more and more gay priests defy the code of silence.

For Dodman, the truth has, finally, set him free.