Catholic priest comes out as gay in newspaper article

The world needs 'authentic role models of healthy, well-balanced, gay, celibate priests' to set an example, Gregory Greiten says

Gregory Greiten at his church in St Bernadette Parish, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (AP)

A Catholic priest has come out as gay in a newspaper article, saying he had been carrying “a secret cloaked in silence” for years.

Leaders in his church had urged him to keep quiet, said Gregory Greiten, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“Since my days in high school seminary in the 1980s, I was taught that homosexuality was something disordered, unspeakable and something to be punished,” he wrote in the National Catholic Reporter.

Students “lived in fear”, he added.

Since being ordained Fr Greiten has served as a minister for 25 years, he said, but often worried whether parishioners “would think of me differently if they knew who I really was”.

He struggled with repressing his true self which he said pushed back ever stronger in a desire to be recognised and accepted, particularly over the last year.

In taking the decision to come out, he wrote: “By choosing to enforce silence, the institutional church pretends that gay priests and religious do not really exist.

“Because of this, there are no authentic role models of healthy, well-balanced, gay, celibate priests to be an example for those, young and old, who are struggling to come to terms with their sexual orientation.

“This only perpetuates the toxic shaming and systemic secrecy.”

Fr Greiten promised the Catholic LGBT community he would be his authentic self, apologising for remaining silent until now.

He said he would “help you, whether you are gay or straight, bisexual or transgendered, to be your authentic self — to be fully alive living in your image and likeness of God”.

He said he hoped that would make the world “a brighter, more tolerant place”.