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I have always admired Father Bryan Massingale, a Catholic theologian at Fordham University. A few years ago, at the Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice, he delivered one of the best lectures I’ve ever heard, on any topic. His focus was on racism in the Catholic Church. Bryan has the ability to focus attention on problematic areas in the church in a way that is both challenging and undeniable. He is an enormous asset in our church.

Another reason I admire him is that he is a Black Catholic priest in a country where there are proportionately fewer Black men in the priesthood. Even rarer, Bryan is also an openly gay man. Now, before we go any further, this means that he is a celibate gay man who is a Catholic priest. (There is always the tendency in some more critical circles to assume that talking about a “gay priest” means someone talking about someone who is sexually active. That is not the case.) So, he is something of, as he says, a “unicorn.” Or what we might have called in earlier times a rara avis.

But as Bryan said in our moving conversation on “The Spiritual Life,” he sees those parts of himself as integrated into a single whole. And, in a sense, aren’t we all “unicorns” in that way, all of us with our own unique constellation of family background, sexuality, emotional makeup, as well as our gifts and blessings, challenges and struggles? Each of us is unique. Nonetheless, Bryan is a rare priest these days.

This rarity has helped Bryan to advocate for those who are marginalized, excluded or ignored in both the church and the broader society. In terms of racism, he tells the shocking story of being rejected in his own church as he was about to celebrate Mass. One parishioner wanted to know why he wasn’t an “ordinary” priest—that is, white. Bryan points out, as he did in the talk that I heard, that whiteness in the church in the United States is normative, with other races, cultures and ethnic makeups seen as extrinsic to the church’s identity.

His experiences shocked me (even though I’ve known him for some time). But as he noted calmly, they shouldn’t surprise us: There is still a great deal of racism in the Catholic Church. 

Ralph McCloud, for example, served for 16 years as the director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the anti-poverty program of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Once, Mr. McCloud visited an unfamiliar town as part of a business trip. On Sunday, staying in a hotel, he looked up a list of local churches to see where he might attend Mass. Upon entering a church filled with white Catholics, a priest approached him at the door and said: “Excuse me. You do know that this is a Catholic church, right?”

“Yes,” said Ralph. “I do know that this is a Catholic church. Do you?”

I’m grateful to my friend Bryan Massingale for living with integrity, for being willing to be a “unicorn” and for turning our eyes to those in the church who are on the margins, including our Black and L.G.B.T.Q. brothers and sisters. We need him, and I was grateful to speak to him this week.