Imagine a final version of that Monday after Pentecost. A staff theologian awakes after a night of cruising in the city — perhaps Monte Caprino on foot, for old time's sake, or the "Capolinea" and the "Colosseo quadrato." Or perhaps he has just returned from a vacation in lay clothing on the shores of the Aegean or at a gay enclave beyond the Alps. Over the years he has enjoyed regular sexual encounters — some negotiated in gay bars, some bought on the streets, some solicited within the concealing walls of church institutions. He has always been careful to hide his employment and usually his priestly status when consorting with laypeople. Not from guilt, which he claims not to feel, but from prudence. He will narrate his encounters, deliciously, to one or another friend in an informal club of similarly active clergymen, but he professes to find the very idea of "coming out" tasteless. Yet he discovers this morning that hearts have been changed around him. What has seemed so long a tidy arrangement of his private pleasures is now being called an injustice. How enthusiastically do you think he will respond to proposals for correction in official teachings?

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The premise of my Pentecost fantasy is not entirely hypothetical. Since gay Catholics believe that God does try to guide even the Vatican bureaucracy, and since most of them also believe that the Vatican's present teachings on homosexuality are not inspired by God, they must trust God to offer during each night and during each day the grace to change the Vatican. Every morning in Rome is a morning on which the pope or his curia could be converted. If they don't convert today, that need not imply some lack in divine will. It may imply something about human stubbornness. It may also suggest the magnitude of the changes required.

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The most important theological facts about Catholicism and homosexuality are not bureaucratic words that Catholic authorities speak. The truly significant facts concern the homosexuality of the Catholic Church itself — of members of its priesthood and its clerical culture, of its rituals and spiritual traditions. If the pope had succeeded in miraculously changing all the official words this morning, he still would not have touched the deepest connections between homosexuality and Catholicism. He would not have admitted the church's richest knowledge of the homoerotic.

The facts of the effects of the homosexual clergy are hardly unique to the Catholic Church. The current controversies over ordaining "practicing" homosexuals in the major denominations suggest how ecumenical the situation is. Nor are closeted clergymen confined to Christianity. In Apuleius's Golden Ass, one of the best-known ancient Latin novels, the priests of Cybele purchase a donkey, who happens to be our unlucky hero Lucius in animal form. There is some suggestion that they mean to enjoy his sex immediately, but their interest turns to a "built" farmer whom they invite to their private banquet in a small town. Their well-plotted orgy is prevented by the braying of Lucius, who summons the locals. The priests are driven out of the town by mockery. (Do note that these pagan priests are neither exiled to permanent silence nor burned at the stake.)

This kind of orgy — there are others like it in Greco-Roman antiquity — raises interesting questions about the links between sexual identity and holiness. The stories can be multiplied many times over by evidence from other cultures. Is it that holy figures need somehow to be set aside from the worldly fame of marrying and child-rearing, which is to say, of alliance and inheritance? Are members of sexual minorities, of a "third sex," freaky or uncanny in a way that associates them with the divine? These questions direct us to analogies for what could otherwise seem particularly Catholic arrangements. But they can also distract us from looking at the evidence right in front of us. It is often easier to think about the priests of Cybele than the priests at the parish right down the block.

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Within any society that universally persecutes same-sex desires, those desires will be kept silent. When members of that society's religious institutions feel them, they will treat them as secrets. When they act on their desires, they will do so secretly. More elaborate priestly or clerical secrecies will be constructed when the religion itself reinforces or initiates persecution of same-sex desires. The most elaborate secrecies will be found in religious institutions that condemn same-sex desires fiercely while creating conditions under which they can flourish: the situation of modern Catholicism.

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We need to consider the multiple forms or places of male homosexuality within modern Catholicism. 3 It is worth doing so for a number of reasons, whatever one's views about the truth of Catholic dogma.

Throughout much of the world, first, the Catholic Church remains the most powerful of Christian organizations. Even in the United States, which has never been a "Catholic country," Catholic bishops enter aggressively into public debates over homosexuality and other matters of sexual morality. They are also able to do so because religious condemnation remains the most potent homophobic rhetoric. So the features of Catholic homosexuality are particularly consequential outside the church.

Second, Catholic homoeroticism has a distinguished and varied history. Catholic clerical arrangements, for example, are very old by Christian standards. They produce rich articulations of male-male desire, both because of centuries of compulsory priestly celibacy and because of the enormous development of all-male religious orders.

Third, and most importantly, the Catholic management of same-sex desire has been decisive in European and American histories of what we now call "homosexuality." This is not just a matter of moral teachings, national legislation, or international bureaucracies for enforcement and punishment. Catholicism has been one of the most homoerotic of widely available modern cultures, offering encouragement, instruction, and relatively safe haven to many homosexuals. You will not understand modern homosexuality unless you understand Catholic homosexuality, and you cannot understand Catholic homosexuality unless you begin with the clergy.

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Other arguments could be made for the importance of paying particular attention to homosexuality in the Catholic Church. But the most telling argument for me is very particular. The Catholic tradition is my Christian tradition. It is not only the one in which I found Christianity or the one I know best by experience, but it is the tradition within which I have had to work out the central paradox for any gay Christian: many Christian churches are at once the most homophobic and the most homoerotic of institutions. They seem cunningly designed to condemn same-sex desire and to elicit it, the persecute it and to instruct it. I sometimes call this is paradox of the "Beloved Disciple": "Come recline beside me and put your head on my chest, but don't dare conceive of what we do as erotic." Perhaps it is more clearly seen as the paradox of the Catholic Jesus, the paradox created by an officially homophobic religion in which an all-male clergy sacrifices male flesh before images of God as an almost naked man. How could such a religion be officially homophobic — and also intensely homoerotic?