Bishop John McCormack of Manchester, NH, says gays should not necessarily be excluded from the priesthood. Am I supposed to be shocked? This is the guy who was such good friends with Paul Shanley that he stayed at the latter’s gay hotel in California (where sex took place out in the open) and who assigned a priest to a parish in New Hampshire without telling anyone that the priest had been in a gay sexual relationship with a teenager.
- McCormack said he does not think the Roman Catholic Church has ever accepted a man who it knew was living openly gay.
It depends on what you mean by the “Roman Catholic Church.” Certainly the Church—by which we mean the whole People of God—has never said it was okay for an openly gay man to be a priest. But there have been plenty of seminaries and religious orders that themselves put forward men that the authorities there knew were practicing homosexuals.
