Former activist disputes gay priest

By DEBORAH GYAPONG
Canadian Catholic News
Ottawa

The document says the Church "cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called 'gay culture.'"

Church applauded

While Renshaw told Sunday Edition host Michael Enright the document was "insidious" and "humiliating," and indicative of "some kind of phobia at the highest level," Alan Yoshioka applauds the Church for taking a strong moral stand.

"I've concluded that the Church is right to call those homosexual appetites of mine disordered," Yoshioka wrote in a blog entry entitled Listening to a gay priest who just doesn't get it at http://thesheepfold.typepad.com.

"My hunger for God is leading me to more and more abundant life, whereas my hunger for men's bodies led to spiritual death," he wrote.

Yoshioka, who was received into the Catholic Church in September, spent more than 15 years as a sexually active gay man and gay activist. When he returned to the Christian faith in 1998, however, he began to question his gay lifestyle.

"Yes, I did try exploring Christ and my homosexuality - and found confirmation that a man cannot serve two masters," he wrote.

Renshaw, however, says the prohibition against homosexual acts is not the part of the document he found the most problematic.

In a telephone interview from Montreal several days after his CBC interview, Renshaw told CCN that he wanted to clarify that he takes his vows of chastity and celibacy "very seriously."

He said the document attacks not only sexual behaviour, but deep-seated homosexual tendencies themselves, and indicates that even those who have remained celibate should be barred from the priesthood.

Cannot change

Though Canadian bishops have not interpreted it that way, other influential Catholics have. That amounts to an attack on the person for something he can't change, says Renshaw. "Homosexuality is not a question of personal choice."

Saying someone's sexual orientation was objectively disordered is "not much different from saying it's an illness." That view, he says, is "discredited today."

That's why he says the document is "humiliating," because it is "shaming people" by "attacking their personal identity" and saying they are "not fully a whole person." "The Church is one of the major institutions that is promoting homophobia and shaming gays."

Yoshioka recalls with sadness that he used to share Renshaw's perspective.

"I used to think of being gay as another ethnicity," he said in a telephone interview from Toronto. "I went so far as to say if I stopped being gay I wouldn't be me anymore."

In fact, he hated hearing that people were praying for him, including his own parents, who he once cursed during a telephone conversation.

"I viewed it as a kind of spiritual rape," he said.

He used to dismiss the idea that you could love the sinner and hate the sin. "It's only as I experienced God's love in a very powerful way that I was freed to transfer my allegiance," he said.

He began to see the truth as the Apostle Paul described in the first chapter of Romans, when he describes what happens when men start worshipping creatures rather than the Creator.

"There is a very deep connection, I believe, between homosexuality and idolatry," he says. "I would put other men in a place where God should be and likewise placed myself in a role where God should be."

When he was wrestling with the question of whether homosexual acts were indeed sinful, he had an assurance that if the acts were sinful, God would give him the strength to resist if he submitted himself to God's will. He has remained celibate for the past five years.

However, Yoshioka finds some conservatives who claim homosexuality is a choice "tedious" and "annoying."

"Some conservative people have rather unrealistic notions about the extent to which these feelings are subject to our control," he said. "What is subject to our control is whether we act on them, and whether we embrace them or resist them."

Keep the door open

Yoshioka would like the Church to continue to ordain priests who may have deep-seated homosexual tendencies as long as they believe Church teaching, practise celibacy and do not identify with the gay culture.

However, if the Church decides that it must reject even those priests, he says he will respect that decision.

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