ROME — Pro-LGBTQ+ Jesuit Father James Martin said Wednesday that he has known “hundreds” of gay priests in his life as a Jesuit, in response to comments by Pope Francis that there is too much “faggotry” in seminaries.
“In my 25 years as a priest and almost 40 as a Jesuit, I’ve known hundreds of holy, faithful and celibate gay priests,” Father Martin wrote on X. “They’ve been my superiors, my teachers, my confessors, my mentors, my spiritual directors and my friends.”
The Jesuit order, in fact, is known to have a remarkably high percentage of homosexual members, making it unsurprising that Father Martin has had gay priests as superiors, confessors, mentors, teachers, and spiritual directors.
According to the estimates of one of Martin’s Jesuit brothers, some 50 percent of the members of the Jesuit order are homosexual.
“Roughly half of the Society under the age of fifty shuffles on the borderline between declared and undeclared gayness,” wrote Jesuit Father Paul Shaughnessy in a 2002 essay in the Weekly Standard, titled, “Are the Jesuits Catholic?”
In his piece, Father Shaughnessy added that “the majority of Jesuit formatores, Jesuits in charge of training, are homosexual as well.”
For Catholics, Father Martin continued, gay priests have “celebrated Masses for you, baptized your children, heard your confessions, visited you in hospitals, presided at your weddings and buried your parents.”
“The church would be immeasurably poorer without them,” he concluded.
In my 25 years as a priest and almost 40 as a Jesuit, I've known hundreds of holy, faithful and celibate gay priests. They've been my superiors, my teachers, my confessors, my mentors, my spiritual directors and my friends. And if you're Catholic, they've celebrated Masses for…
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 29, 2024
Father Martin was reacting to recent news from Italy that Pope Francis reiterated Church teaching that men with homosexual tendencies should be barred from entry into seminary and from ordination to the priesthood.
The news caught the public eye because of the pontiff’s choice of some rather salty language to state the case in a closed-door session with the Italian bishops.
In the May 20 meeting, the 87-year-old pope said there was already too much frociaggine in the Church, a vulgar Italian slur that translates to “faggotry.”
The bishops should “get all the queers [checche] out of seminary, even those who are only semi-oriented,” the pope added.
When the news broke, the Vatican was swift to offer an apology, insisting that the pope “never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms,” while notably not denying that he uttered the expressions attributed to him.
Commenting on the news, Catholic League President Bill Donohue, a sociologist who wrote the groundbreaking 2021 book The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes, noted Wednesday that homosexual priests have been responsible for most of the cases (81 percent) in which a minor has been sexually abused.
The Vatican “sought to correct this problem in 2005 when it barred those with ‘deep-seated homosexual tendencies’ from entering the seminaries,” Donohue observed, and, subsequently, “the number of abuse cases has declined to almost nil.”
