Ordination Does Not Impart Sexual Discipline

Sexually active seminarians do not start leading celibate lives once they are ordained

Following my August 27, 2001 publication of “Home Alone in the Priesthood” in America magazine in which I addressed the physical, psychological, and spiritual problems priests face as more of them find themselves alone pastoring parishes that were staffed in the past by two or three priests, I couldn’t understand why then-Archbishop Edwin O’Brien had his lawyer approach me during a chaplain retreat about returning to my diocese. I had just been assigned to the largest operational Marine Corps Command in the world supervising some 150 chaplains stationed or deployed between Yuma, AZ and the Horn of Africa. Two months after assuming those duties, the Secretary of the Navy awarded me the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for “literary achievement and inspirational leadership.” With a serious shortage of chaplains in the Archdiocese for the Military Services (AMS), why would the Archbishop not want me to serve for another 11 years before reaching mandatory retirement? The answer to that question came a few months later in January 2002 when the Spotlight Team of The Boston Globe began publishing a series of articles on sex abuse and cover ups in the Catholic Church.

In my article I made a passing reference to the sexual predation of minors and vulnerable adults by Catholic chaplains serving with Marines that I had to deal with while serving as the Deputy Chaplain of the Marine Corps (1994-97). I had no idea that the abuse problem I mentioned was as large as it was not only in the military and the United States, but also in the world. My article “hit a sensitive nerve” owing to the fact that, in a three year period, I dealt with six abuse victims in the United States Marine Corps that makes up only 11 percent of the AMS, while Archbishop O’Brien reported just two victims in the entire AMS over a fifty-two year period (1950-2002). Clearly, my article contradicted O’Brien’s grossly underreported figures. An investigation by BishopAccountability.org would later reveal that the number of abuse victims in the AMS was not two, but more likely over 500.

Just as I had no idea initially what I did to make O’Brien want to get rid of me, so too did former seminarian Anthony Gorgia not know why Cardinal Timothy Dolan did not allow him to return to the North American College (NAC) in Rome following a surgical procedure in December 2018 after Gorgia received glowing evaluations from his faculty and peers.  After Gorgia spent two years writing to both U.S. and Vatican officials who ignored his reports, it became clear that he was perceived as a threat to outing the NAC’s gay then-rector, Father Peter Harman, and to documenting sexual predation on the part of the vice rector, Father Adam Park. Having gathered proof of the injustice he suffered, Gorgia filed suit in New York Supreme Court against Cardinal Dolan and NAC officials who retaliated against him.

Gorgia’s lawsuit is supported by a significant amount of evidence and witnesses to prove Gorgia’s unjust termination and the sexual discrimination he experienced by homosexual seminary leaders based on his heterosexual orientation. Seminarians, priests, and even a former highly-credentialed former FBI Special Agent in Charge testified under oath how Harman and Park were homosexuals who feared their sexual behavior, if made public as happened in the case of Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, could destroy their careers. Dolan and NAC officials, who unlike the blue collar Gorgia family have a massive financial war chest replenished by parishioners who contribute to weekly collection baskets and diocesan appeals, retained high-priced law firms including the pro-LGBTQ firm of Fox Rothchild that employs over 1,000 lawyers.

When Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported in January 2022 that the judge dismissed Gorgia’s lawsuit based on the court’s lack of “jurisdiction over the Rome-based seminary and its employees,” it failed to report that Gorgia’s lawyer was filing an appeal. Because CNA misled many people to believe the case was over, contributions to Gorgia’s “Save Our Seminarians Fund” dried up. In an effort to bankrupt Gorgia and have him drop the case, the lawyers representing Dolan and the NAC filed multiple requests for extensions over the past three years. As happens in many abuse cases when dioceses employ these tactics which only revictimizes the victims, so too has Gorgia and his parents suffered physically, emotionally, financially, and spiritually.

Just as the abuse I reported in my America article represented only a microscopic percentage of the abuse that had been going on in the Catholic Church, so too does the evidence in the Gorgia lawsuit represent only a small fraction of the sexual predation and homosexual misconduct that is taking place in Catholic seminaries around the world with the exception of Africa and countries where seminary faculties are not staffed by homosexual clergy as is often the case in the United States, Europe, and South America.

It is very difficult to be a sexually active heterosexual seminarian living in a seminary populated by men.  However, it is easy for homosexual seminarians to engage in sex especially in an environment where the faculty members are also sexually active homosexuals. Monsignor Otto Garcia, a priest of the Brookyn Diocese who was put in charge of sexual abuse cases by former Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio (who himself was accused of abuse by two minor boys), was reported to have preyed on a seminarian at the NAC only later to be ordained and accused of abusing two boys, including Tommy Davis, a teen in his first parish.

When then-Monsignor Edwin O’Brien was the NAC rector (1990-1994), he invited NAC alumnus, Father Robert Kelly, a priest of the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese, to serve as the Academic Dean. It was during O’Brien’s tenure as rector that New Jersey psychiatrist and AIDS expert, Dr. Joseph Barone, reported that one in 12 NAC seminarians tested HIV-positive. When a former parishioner of Kelly was discerning a vocation to the priesthood and visited Kelly in Rome, he asked one NAC seminarian, “Is Father Kelly gay?” In response, the seminarian was reported to have said, “Are you kidding? He’s sleeping with half the faculty and many students.” Within a year of that visit, Kelly’s five-year contract was cut short and his Ordinary, the late Bishop Joseph Adamec, came up with an excuse that Kelly returned early because of a “drinking problem.” Years later, two men, including Tony Coray, accused Kelly of abusing them between 1975 and 1978 when they were 12-14 years old. Similar to the case involving Garcia, the alleged abuse took place at Kelly’s first parish shortly after he was ordained. When he was 39 years old, Coray said, “For as painful as it was, the most devastating part of my encounters with Father Kelly was not the violation of my body, but the damage to my soul.”

What Catholics fail to understand is that homosexual seminarians and priests like Park, Garcia, Kelly and others who were in the habit of engaging in homosexual relations while in the seminary with faculty members and other gay seminarians, were not all of a sudden going to begin leading celibate lives once they were ordained. It would be like a daughter telling her dad, “I know Vinny is fooling around and abuses drugs and alcohol, but after we get married, he promised me he would stop.”

The Gay Report, a benchmark survey on homosexuality in the United States, showed that 73 percent of homosexuals acknowledged having “had sexual relations with males 16 to 19 or younger.” Based on reports and lawsuits involving straight seminarians like Anthony Gorgia, Karl Discher, Timothy Passow, Wieslaw Walawender, Stephen Parisi, and many others who were unjustly dismissed for reporting ongoing sexual predation and homosexual misconduct in their seminaries, one can expect to read about more victims in the future like Coray and Davis, as well as predators like Park, Garcia, Kelly, and others.

Anyone wishing to support unjustly dismissed seminarians and halt the ordinations of so many sexually active homosexuals is invited to contribute to the “Save Our Seminarians Fund.”

Gene Thomas Gomulka is a sexual abuse victims’ advocate, investigative reporter, and screenwriter. A former Navy (O6) Captain/Chaplain, seminary instructor, and diocesan respect life director, Gomulka was ordained a priest for the Altoona-Johnstown diocese and later made a Prelate of Honor (Monsignor) by St. John Paul II. Email him at msgr.investigations@gmail.com.

Post Views: 182