InsideOut: Interview with Paul Murray

By Owen Lipstein / Amanda Schmidt January/February 2009



Paul Murray is the Catholic chaplain at Bard College, where he teaches gender and sexuality studies, religion, and theology. He became Washington, D.C.’s first openly gay priest in the 1990s, and has now written about that experience in Life in Paradox: The Story of a Gay Catholic Priest (O-Books, 2008).


Father Murray spoke with InsideOut about coming out to his parishioners from the pulpit, being accused of heresy, and how he sees the church changing in response to gay and lesbian lives—both in- and outside the diocese.



InsideOut: Why did you want to be a priest, and not just a parishioner?



Paul Murray: Well, I think that the urge to somehow take hold of the very symbols, the emblems of the religion, was just something I had to taste and see for myself. Ever since I was a small kid, there was this spiritual trip built into me. I used the term “religion,” but it is also appropriate to use the term “spirituality,” because the drive from the mainstream Episcopal Church to the Episcopal High Church to Roman Catholicism to joining the seminary to moving to Rome—each of these steps was part of a process [driven by] a sense of restlessness.
[I thought]: There’s something I’m looking for that I haven’t found. Why haven’t I found it? Years of soul-searching, [and] I haven’t really properly absorbed this or that aspect of Catholic life. With time—and I think that the gay aspect of my experience helped with this tremendously—I grew to have more confidence in myself and my own choices.



IO: You developed a case of what’s called “scrupulosity” at seminary.



PM: In order to maintain what Catholics call a state of grace, they’re very concerned to confess all of their sins, to wipe the slate clean and so on. When I changed over from the Episcopal Church to the Roman Catholic Church, that had not really occurred to me. I knew I would be going to confession on a regular basis. I had already been doing that, to some extent, as an Episcopalian, but this took on a new sense of obligation.
As a result of that, I was, in fact, obsessed with minor infractions or, really, things that are not infractions whatsoever. I was a young kid, trying to put things together, and I feel like I should have gotten some positive guidance [from more mature priests] about that. I think wise confessors understand this as a problem that needs to be overcome, but at [the] same time, there’s something about the approach to sin that actually fosters this.



IO: Are you saying that the church’s approach to sin hampers us as spiritual beings?



PM: It seems to me that Jesus of Nazareth preached to a wide range of people about the kingdom of God, [but] sin did not enter his preaching in a major way. I don’t say that it’s completely absent. You can read through the Gospels and find references concerning divorce, for example, [where] his concern seems to be with the status of women.
It was very easy to divorce a woman. A man did not need to come up with very serious reasons for it. A divorced woman, under certain circumstances, would really be outcast or possibly destitute. I think that a lot of the teachings of Jesus, if looked at more closely, reflect a basic concern for humanity, rather than [a concern solely] with sin.
His real concern with sin is fully blown, fully developed sin on the part of the religious leaders of his time—people who were telling other people how to live their lives, or presenting themselves as models of religious conduct. That, I think, he found to be really offensive, and kind of a blasphemy against God.



IO: You came out in a homily. How did your
parishioners react?



PM: Some people in the gay community would not want to say that I had come out because I didn’t use the words “I am gay” in an explicit way. However, people came up to me in tears. It’s still moving to think about it. Because St. Matthew’s Cathedral, where I had served for a long time—for 11 years—is close to DuPont Circle in Washington, [D.C.]; [and a] lot of gay people worshipped there, but they never heard their name. And I was talking about saints who either had same-sex partners in their youth, or had demonstrated an interest and a capacity for same-sex love.



IO: Can you name a couple?



PM: Well, there is St. Aelred, who is an 11th-century—I’m not sure if Anglo-Saxon is the right term—Anglo-Habit. There are others who can be named, but I would never want to exclude [St.] Sergius and Baucus, who were 4th-century Roman officers; they were particular favorites of the emperor and they had enemies, [especially] because they had risen so quickly in his favor. They were denounced as Christian—it wasn’t that they were gay that was the accusation; that would have been of no concern in the Roman Empire. They suffered terrible deaths.
One of the fascinating aspects of the martyrdom [of Sergius and Baucus] is the account of how one died before the other in their torments. Sergius was going to be executed in the morning and his partner, Baucus, appears to him during the night looking beautiful, radiant, and says to him, “Don’t despair. Hold on. Because I am the reward awaiting you on the other side.”
I included that in this homily, some of these stories that people had not heard before. And they were astonished.



IO: How did you feel in those moments?



PM: It was a tremendous release. I prayed about this for a long time before doing it. It was my farewell sermon to a place that I loved. A colleague of mine had died. So I felt that it was likely that St. Matthew’s would become much less gay-friendly, and that concerned me. I just felt that the time was right, and I also had a growing anger about the AIDS epidemic and the failure of the Reagan administration to do much of anything [about it].



IO: Can you describe the tension, or paradox, of being part of an institution whose tenets include unconditional love and acceptance—but not exactly for you, and not exactly for one of the types of love you’re capable of?



PM: I don’t know how to say what it was like. I was in a growing process, so I was aware of certain fears and tensions and anxieties that had held me back, but I was reaching a point where I wasn’t being held back. I was growing in freedom, even while I was still functioning as a priest in a parish.



IO: How has the church been changed by gay and lesbian lives—both within its ranks as parishioners, priests and bishops; and without, by the outer culture?



PM: Well, I find that a fascinating question, in that I assume that the church is made up of human beings. Even the bishops, even the cardinals are human beings. You close the door to the room, the jokes are the same, the awareness of the world around us is similar. But I think that there is a rigidity and a sense of political correctness within the church that has put a lot of these people much more on their guard than in the past. So I think that things have gotten more rigid. The only change that comes to mind is that the lines have been hardened. The church has chosen the path of culture war on this and women’s issues. And as far as I can see, you can go back from the 1970s to the present day—I’m talking at the level of the Vatican, the level of the papacy—and I don’t see one iota of change.



IO: Well, is it coming? And if so, will the agents of change be on the fringes of Catholicism?



PM: One of the most heartening things for me is the ordination of women that is taking place—two or three women here, two or three women there—in the United States and in Europe. They’re theologically prepared, they’re pastorally prepared, and they are part of an organization (I don’t know all of the organizations, but the Women’s Ordination Conference is one of the centers for this). Increasingly, [however], the bishops—including one of my classmates, Ray Burke—are responding with automatic ex-communications. In St. Louis, Missouri, there was an ordination of two or three women last Fall. The ordination was scheduled for a synagogue, because no church would touch it. Archbishop Burke exerted pressure against that synagogue, but he failed to stop the event.
So the women were told that they were ex-communicated automatically, and others who had participated were threatened in various ways. Some, if they worked for the diocese, were removed from their jobs.
This is tough stuff. But what we need are some tough agents today—activists. What I’m finding is that more and more people are just tired of it, and they’re coming forward and they’re saying, “This [change] is something that I believe in, and I want to be a part of.”



IO: Why did the Archdiocese of Washington, [D.C.], begin investigating you in 2004?



PM: I had issued—through the press office at Bard College—an open invitation to the Catholic Mass at Bard to [everyone], regardless of status or belief, including those who find their needs met in conventional parishes. The archdiocese in New York [City had] just never heard anything so outrageous.



IO: That led to charges of heresy?



PM: [The Archdiocese of] Washington realized that this is not much to go on, so they started poking around on the Internet to see what they could find. And what they found was that I’m a member of an organization of married priests, although I’m not married, and that I was offering this course at Bard called “Same-Sex Unions in Christianity” that was clearly “heretical.”



IO: The archdioceses in New York and D.C. removed your faculties, but to date, there’s been no heresy trial.



PM: Yes, they removed my faculties—the official permission to function as a priest in public. I have the impression that [the trial] will not completely drop and that, in fact, some kind of additional action is imminent. I’ve been in touch over the past couple of months with another [church] official in Washington, and so I know that they’re still thinking about me.
They would like to do it in a way that doesn’t generate publicity. I think they’re concerned about publicity.



IO: How does it feel to be officially accused of heresy?



PM: It’s tragic, in that I look at the Catholic Church and I think of the tremendous potential that’s lost because of the foolishness of things such as this. But at the same time, it’s great fun, because these guys are poking around in the woods or something. They don’t know where they’re going. If you can see that, it gives [you a] perspective that sort of makes it OK.