The Gay Church

Thousands of priests are closeted, and the Vatican’s failure to reckon with their sexuality has created a crisis for Catholicism.

By Andrew Sullivan

Photo: Governatorato S.C.V., Direzione dei Musei, All Rights Reserved

We have no reliable figures on just how many priests in the Catholic Church are gay. The Vatican has conducted many studies on its own clergy but never on this subject. In the United States, however, where there are 37,000 priests, no independent study has found fewer than 15 percent to be gay, and some have found as many as 60 percent. The consensus in my own research over the past few months converged on around 30 to 40 percent among parish priests and considerably more than that — as many as 60 percent or higher — among religious orders like the Franciscans or the Jesuits.

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