Will New Canonization Rule Open Door to Gay Saint?

Pope Francis has introduced a new path to canonization for would-be Catholic saints. Now, in addition to martyrdom, living a life of heroic Christian virtue and “exceptional cases” (where someone has been venerated as holy since ancient times), Christians who lay down their lives for another will be eligible for beatification (the first step toward sainthood).

The new category has some very large strings attached, as spelled out in Francis’ July letter announcing it:

There must be “the free and voluntary offering of life and the heroic acceptance out of charity of certain death in a short term” and there must be “a link between the offering of life and the premature death.”

There must be “the practice of the Christian virtues, at least to an ordinary degree, before the offering of [one’s] life, and then until death.”

There must be “the existence of the fame of sanctity and of signs [of holiness], at least after death.”

There is “the need for a miracle for beatification, that happens after the death of the Servant of God and through his/her intercession.”

So who would qualify for beatification under this new rule? According to The Associated Press, “examples of people who might fall into that category include those who take the place of someone condemned to death or expectant mothers with fatal diseases who suspend treatment so their babies can be born.”

 

One of the first names put forward for beatification under the new rule was that of the late Fr. Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest and chaplain for the New York City Fire Department, who died as a first responder in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Ruth Graham told Judge’s story in Slate magazine, in an article dated 11 September 2017. The morning of the attack, Judge, who had worked at St. Francis of Assisi church in Manhattan since 1986, received a call and headed downtown with an off-duty captain and a firefighter. He made it into the lobby of the north tower where he tried to assist people, many of whom had jumped from higher floors. The tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. “When the dust cleared,” writes Graham, “firefighters stumbled over his body.” Judge was 68. At his funeral, “St. Francis of Assisi overflowed with mourners.”

But his final act of bravery was not his first, as a long-time friend of Judge’s, the Marist Brother Salvatore Sapienza, told Graham:

At a time when some doctors were still afraid to touch or even treat AIDS patients, Judge cradled dying men in his arms, administered the Eucharist and the last rites, spoke at their funerals, and comforted their families and friends. “Mychal really knew that gay Catholics were being treated like second-class citizens by the church,” Sapienza said.

He knew it because he was gay himself, a fact friends like Sapienza, who is also gay, began to speak of openly only after Judge’s death. Writes Graham:

[People] who knew Judge describe him as a man of almost supernatural charisma, an extrovert who enveloped everyone he met into his aura. But few in the wide circle who adored him and relied on him were aware during his lifetime that he was gay. “I was one of Mychal’s 9,412 best friends,” said Michael Daly, a former New York Daily News columnist who wrote a 2008 biography of Judge, The Book of Mychal. “And 9,406 of us didn’t know he was gay.”

In fact, Judge had been in a long-term relationship with a man named Al Alvaredo. A nurse who, writes Graham, was denied entry to the church during Judge’s funeral because “no one knew who he was.”

 

Judge’s story bears some similarities to that of another well-known gay priest, Fr. John McNeill (and no, I don’t know his father’s name), who passed away in September 2015 in Florida at the age of 90, having spent a good part of his life battling to have the Catholic Church accept and welcome gay men and lesbians. For his efforts, McNeill was expelled from the Jesuits. His New York Times obituary said McNeill’s book, The Church and The Homosexual, “exploded” onto the scene in 1976 as “the first extended non-judgmental work about gay Catholics.” After “an extensive review of the manuscript by a panel of theologians,” the book had received the Vatican’s imprimatur.

McNeill became widely known through appearances on various American TV shows. After identifying himself as gay in an interview with Tom Brokaw on the “Today” show in 1976, he received “stacks of hate mail,” including death threats. The Times obit, by Margolit Fox, relates McNeill’s life story from the time of his birth in 1925, through his military service in the 87th Infantry and his prisoner-of-war days when he was kept in a sealed boxcar without food or water, “licking water from the boxcar nail heads.” He stated on one occasion that he always wanted the kind of faith and courage “to be ready to risk my life to help someone in need.” (Which sounds remarkably like the new criteria for sainthood.)

Following the war, McNeill began his studies toward priesthood and was ordained by Cardinal Spellman in 1959 in New York, received a doctorate in philosophy in 1964, and later, Fox writes, training as a psychotherapist.

McNeill began speaking in public on gay Catholic issues, but in 1977, the Vatican reneged on its imprimatur of his book and insisted that he discontinue writing or speaking on the subject of gay rights, which he agreed to do. With the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, however, Fox says McNeill set up an AIDS ministry in Harlem, (much as Fr. Mychal Judge had done) and when the Vatican, in 1986, declared homosexuality to be “a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” McNeill once again went public, condemning that sentiment in a letter to the New York Times. Not surprisingly, he was expelled from the Jesuits on orders from the Vatican and deprived of his right to say Mass.

While this caused him “great pain”, according to Fox, McNeill finally felt free to “become more visible than ever as an activist.” He continued practicing psychotherapy, married his long-time partner, Charles Chiarelli, in Toronto in 2008, and wrote two more books. He also, as the gay theologian and writer Dr. Mary Hunt told Fox, remained “very much a Catholic throughout his life, remained very much a Jesuit in his orientation throughout his life and remained very much a priest throughout his life.”

 

And so here we have at least two very well-known and very dedicated gay priests, who, in their lives and their selfless service to those in the LGBT community, defied the Catholic Church and its very unchristian teachings and non-inclusive treatment of homosexuals.

Does Pope Francis’ oft-reported line “Who Am I To Judge?” ring true when the Church he leads continues to refuse equality to such a large group of Catholics? Will it deny that gay people can also be virtuous and holy?

The fate of Judge’s candidacy for beatification will be a good indicator. His case is being pushed by an Argentinian priest, the Rev. Luis Escalante, who works in Rome as a part-time “postulator,” which Graham describes as a sort of lawyer representing “a potential saint’s candidacy.”

Escalente has begun gathering “stories and documents” from America as a first step in the process that might lead to Judge’s canonization. According to Graham, Judge’s sexual orientation “should be no barrier to official sainthood” since there is no evidence that he was ever unfaithful to his vows of chastity. “Even to traditionalist Catholics, he should be perfectly acceptable because he lived what the catechism taught,” Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest who serves as both the editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine America a consultant to the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications, told Graham, characterizing Judge as a “perfect test case.”

But a test it will be, given that Judge’s embrace of his own sexuality challenged the Church’s stand on homosexuality as “intrinsically disordered.”

There’s no lack of commentary as to whether other gays have been canonized — in fact, Father Martin is on record as saying some Catholic saints were “probably gay.” (St. Sebastian, Joan of Arc and — believe it or not — both Martha and Mary, among others.) And it stands to reason that of an estimated 10,000 Catholic saints, there would have to be some who were gay.

But the question for the Catholic Church, according to Sapienza, is not so much if an LGBT person “could be considered holy in a general sense,” but rather if Catholicism would accept a candidate for sainthood whose sexuality left no room for interpretation – a person who, as Sapienza said of Judge, “loved being gay and loved being Catholic.”

As for Sapienza himself, he left the Church 10 years before Judge’s death, married and became a pastor of a Protestant church. He told Graham:

As a young idealistic person, I thought I could be this bridge between the gay community and the Catholic community. Mychal worked to the end of his life to be that bridge.

 

 

 

 

Dolores Campbell, a lifelong resident of Sydney, is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Cape Breton Highlander, the Nova Scotian, Cape Breton Magazine, Catholic New Times and The Cape Breton Post.

 

 

 

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