Just Say No to Forced Emotional Labor for Clergy
A term that has recently entered The Discourse, or at least I have recently become aware of it, is "emotional labor." Emotional labor is the work of regulating one's own feelings and emotional state in such a way as to maintain some sort of social environment. More specifically, it is controlling or restraining one's own natural or reflexive emotional state in order to prevent someone else's emotional state from spiraling out of control. So, if you are in a situation where you are scared of something, but you have to suppress or hide that because you know that if you show fear you will cause the person you are with to completely freak out, you are undertaking emotional labor.
Emotional labor is usually brought up in the context of male/female relations, tied to the claim that women are expected to perform an undue amount of emotional labor insofar as they are presumed to have responsibility for the emotional state of their male partner. Here we might think of "forced" emotional labor--some situation is bad/emotionally fraught, and the woman is expected to find some way to defuse or manage the situation by changing her emotional state. Probably everyone can think of relationship counter-examples where the gender polarity is reversed and the man is doing most of the emotional labor, and there is surely forced emotional labor going on in same-sex couples, too, but the most common arrangement in heterosexual couples is for the woman to have to take on responsibility for the emotional state of both herself and her male partner. Regardless of the gender arrangement, this sort of scenario is seen, correctly, as an unfair and disproportionate burden on the party doing the emotional labor, especially if it is the other party's emotional state that was the source of the problem in the first place.
Lurking in the background of discussions of emotional labor and forced emotional labor is the notion that people are generally responsible for managing their own emotional state in a manner that is not disruptive to others. Thus, making someone do emotional labor is imposing costs on others in a way that is not OK. In other words, the ultimate and best response to someone asking you to take on forced emotional labor, especially in a sustained way, is "no, you need to deal with your own issues; don't make other people responsible for fixing or managing your internal life."
It is through the lens of emotional labor and forced emotional labor that I want to talk about James Alison's series of articles in the Tablet. Long time readers know that I am a massive James Alison fan. But this series, especially the second one, profoundly misses the mark, and the longer I thought about it the more tone-deaf and part-of-the-problem this piece seemed.
The bulk of the two articles describe the current state of things with regard to the clerical culture in the Roman Catholic Church. Here, I think Alison is completely on target in the sense that he accurately describes the mechanisms and thought-processes of the clergy in North America and Europe. [If I may be indulged in a bit of self-promotion, it's basically the same picture I painted a year-and-a-half ago]. I'm not going to lay out the whole argument, but the short version is (1) most of the clergy are gay; (2) many of them have secret or not-so secret partners of one sort or another; (3) the most zealous anti-gay crusaders inside the Roman Catholic Church are also gay, and either deeply closeted and tortured, or using homophobia as a way to get ahead and "throw people off the scent;" (4) the pervasive culture of dissembling about one's sexuality created space for abusers to operate; and (5) priority #1 is to protect the clerical culture and the associated closet, even if it means allowing abusers to do their thing.
Here's the problem, and it finally came into focus reading Alison's second piece and talking it through a bit with friend-of-the-blog Bill Lindsey. The whole purpose of the piece, I think, is to try to generate sympathy for the "good" closeted gay priests, the ones with partners who don't try to persecute anyone or push an agenda down anyone's throat, so that they are not scapegoated for the fallout around the abuse revelations. This is best summed up in a tidy paragraph in the first article:
An anecdotal illustration: a few years ago, I found myself leading a retreat for Italian gay priests in Rome. Of the nearly fifty participants some were single, some partnered, for others it was the first time they had ever been able to talk honestly with other priests outside the confessional. Among them there were seven or eight mid-level Vatican officials. I asked one from the Congregation for the Clergy what he made of those attending with their partners. He smiled and said, “Of course, we know that the partnered ones are the healthy ones.” Let that sink in. In the clerical closet, dishonesty is functional, honesty is dysfunctional, and the absence or presence of circumspect sexual practice between adult males is irrelevant.
Alison portrays this group in particular as folks who have become victims of a system that once was more-or-less good and has now turned cancerous. This is because, in Alison's telling, they have come to understand that what the Roman Catholic Church says about being gay is not true, and thus they entered and participated in celibate clergy life under false pretenses.
I understand, and even to a great degree agree, with this argument. My problem has to do with the remedy. If I may put on my lawyer hat for a moment, we can think of the relationship between a clergyperson and the church as a kind of a contract. Alison's argument is that the Roman Catholic Church induced gay men to agree to the contract by telling them that there was no legitimate or life-affirming expression of their sexuality anyway, so by "signing up" for celibacy they were in a sense not giving anything up. Let's stipulate that this is true. If you are induced under false pretenses to sign a contract, and you can prove it, the remedy is that you get to void the contract, and return to the status quo prior to the contract. What you don't get to do is unilaterally change the terms of the contract. So, I am 100% on-board with a gay priest saying "I now understand that I was induced to pledge or vow celibacy under false pretenses, and so I now feel myself free to leave the priesthood and enter into relationships notwithstanding those vows." But the "good" closeted gay priests are really saying "I now understand that I was induced to pledge or vow celibacy under false pretenses, and so I now feel myself free to simply ignore the vow or pledge of celibacy while still insisting on all of the privileges of being a priest under the current system." Whatever the circumstances under which you entered into the contract, you had to understand that you were pledging to be celibate. You don't get to simply write that line out of the agreement.
And this is where the emotional labor part comes in. I am very sympathetic to the emotional conflict suffered by gay men in the context of the Roman Catholic priesthood. I have seen it first-hand. But ultimately navigating that turmoil is the responsibility of the individual priest himself. Leaving is a perfectly valid solution to the turmoil; so is staying, publicly stating your truth, fighting for change, and accepting whatever consequences come from that advocacy; so, as well, is deciding that you are going to be bound by what you have promised and you are committed to seeing it through one way or another. All of those solutions involve taking responsibility for your own emotional state and well-being. But unilaterally opting yourself out of the requirement of celibacy and (consciously or subconsciously) using the power of the institution to cover up your decision while leaving everyone else out in the cold is externalizing the costs of your emotional turmoil on other people--especially LGBT lay people who are still subject to the rules and their consequences from which the priest has successfully immunized himself. That decision is profoundly narcissistic and self-serving, taking all the benefits without bearing any of the costs. In a very real way, they are making LGBT lay people take on their emotional labor and bear their burdens.
So what I am saying is that I have come to realize that I actually have very little sympathy for the "good" closeted priests, and in a real way have less sympathy for them than I do for the tortured inquisitors. See, the tortured ones are tortured because they have internalized a pathological understanding of their own self and their own sexuality. The demons have gotten to them, and in my book they have something in the nature of an insanity defense. But these "good" closeted priests have no such excuse. The tortured ones are sick, but the "good" ones are cynical, and I can deal with sick much more readily than I can deal with cynical.
If it were just the internal psycho-drama, that would be one thing. But all of this comes with the back drop of the fact that some of the stuff that this system is keeping under wraps is not just Priest A and Priest B being partners, but also Priest X raping children and Priest Y coercing or harassing people into unwanted sexual encounters. Understand that since at least 2002, and truthfully for much, much longer, the "good" gay priests have known perfectly well that they are participating in a system that facilitated, and continues to facilitate, the abuse and exploitation of children and adults. In the face of this reality, and with full knowledge of the consequences that this system they created has on wholly innocent parties, they have chosen to do nothing. "Well, I know 'Uncle Teddy' preys on seminarians who are wholly dependent on him for their career (and kids, as it turns out), but if I say anything it might blow up my spot and jeopardize my cushy set up with my partner, so tough shit for those seminarians." That's the reality of what the "good" gay priests have been doing for the last 30 years. They have decided that protecting a system is more important than the lives and well-being of real people--and they don't actually believe in the predicate tenets of the system anyway. It's all well and good that, as Alison says, the "knowing clerical gay milieu is genuinely shocked and baffled when minors are involved," but that "shock" and "bafflement" translated into them doing jack shit for the those who were harmed.
And for what? These guys could live with their chosen partners in broader society freely, subject only to the remaining harassment inflicted by the conservative elements of the culture (conservative elements which the organization that they represent work hard to support and encourage, by the way). If they want to stay in ordained ministry, they can walk down the street to anyone of a number of other churches who would likely take them in. There are many avenues for these men to live with integrity, and without having to participate and facilitate the system that has done so much damage. But, again, those avenues require these men to take responsibility for their own emotional well-being and integrity, and that is a kind of emotional labor. Staying in the closeted confines is much easier, and so that's what they in the main have chosen to do. No matter what the consequences to others.
And into this mix, here comes Alison implying that it is somehow the laity's responsibility to create conditions under which these gay priests can have a soft landing from the mess they have created for themselves:
Nevertheless, it is only when straightforward, and obviously true, Christian messaging like Francis’ becomes normal among the laity themselves that honesty can become the norm among the clergy. Otherwise we will continue with the absurd and pharisaical current situation in which there is one rule for the clergy (“doesn’t matter what you do so long as you don’t say so in public or challenge the teaching”) and another for the laity, passed off as “the teaching of the Church”, and brutally enforced, for instance, among employees of Catholic schools, parish organists, softball coaches and the like.
Only when it is clear (as it is increasingly) that the laity are quite confident in the (obviously true) view that “if you are this way, then learning to love appropriately is going to flow from, not despite, this” will it be possible to change, without scandal, the formal rules regarding the clergy.
Sorry, no. This is not the laity's problem, nor the laity's responsibility to create a "soft landing" to facilitate clergy becoming untangled from the ropes they have tied themselves in. This is exactly the kind of thing that people who talk about women doing forced emotional labor complain about--creating an emotional crisis and then turning to the other person expecting them to soothe and turn the temperature down. It has become abundantly clear to everyone who has eyes to see that the "abuse crisis" is a clergy problem, and so the clergy need to get their house in order, and stop blaming others or looking for the laity to throw them a lifeline.
If you are a gay Roman Catholic priest who is with a partner and thinks that there is nothing wrong with that, then the right thing to do is to say so, right now, publicly. And, while doing so, it would be nice for you to express some contrition for the fact that you sat around and said nothing when other partnered LGBT folks were thrown under the bus by the Roman Catholic church. But, in any event, the time for honesty, full honesty, is now. Not when you feel affirmed by the laity, or feel safe, or when there are no potential consequences for your honesty, but now. Take responsibility for your emotional state and integrity, do the right thing, and be honest. Stop imposing the emotional costs of your sexuality on other people.
Do I believe this will happen? Absolutely not. Not unless the laity demands it, and I don't really see how the laity could actually demand it. I am afraid that many of those who are (justifiably, utterly so) angry and demanding action are going to learn the lesson that I learned at a Baptism outside of Philadelphia--the Roman Catholic Church is the clergy's show, and you have no power to do anything other than leave. And for all of the reasons set forth in Alison's two pieces, the clergy have come up with a formula that works for them, and they are going to ride that train for as long as it will carry them.
The, again wholly justified, anger that you see in the broader Roman Catholic sphere, cutting across political and theological orientations, is the result of the laity being forced to do emotional labor for the clergy for two generations. People are fed up, and they should be fed up.
Emotional labor is usually brought up in the context of male/female relations, tied to the claim that women are expected to perform an undue amount of emotional labor insofar as they are presumed to have responsibility for the emotional state of their male partner. Here we might think of "forced" emotional labor--some situation is bad/emotionally fraught, and the woman is expected to find some way to defuse or manage the situation by changing her emotional state. Probably everyone can think of relationship counter-examples where the gender polarity is reversed and the man is doing most of the emotional labor, and there is surely forced emotional labor going on in same-sex couples, too, but the most common arrangement in heterosexual couples is for the woman to have to take on responsibility for the emotional state of both herself and her male partner. Regardless of the gender arrangement, this sort of scenario is seen, correctly, as an unfair and disproportionate burden on the party doing the emotional labor, especially if it is the other party's emotional state that was the source of the problem in the first place.
Lurking in the background of discussions of emotional labor and forced emotional labor is the notion that people are generally responsible for managing their own emotional state in a manner that is not disruptive to others. Thus, making someone do emotional labor is imposing costs on others in a way that is not OK. In other words, the ultimate and best response to someone asking you to take on forced emotional labor, especially in a sustained way, is "no, you need to deal with your own issues; don't make other people responsible for fixing or managing your internal life."
It is through the lens of emotional labor and forced emotional labor that I want to talk about James Alison's series of articles in the Tablet. Long time readers know that I am a massive James Alison fan. But this series, especially the second one, profoundly misses the mark, and the longer I thought about it the more tone-deaf and part-of-the-problem this piece seemed.
The bulk of the two articles describe the current state of things with regard to the clerical culture in the Roman Catholic Church. Here, I think Alison is completely on target in the sense that he accurately describes the mechanisms and thought-processes of the clergy in North America and Europe. [If I may be indulged in a bit of self-promotion, it's basically the same picture I painted a year-and-a-half ago]. I'm not going to lay out the whole argument, but the short version is (1) most of the clergy are gay; (2) many of them have secret or not-so secret partners of one sort or another; (3) the most zealous anti-gay crusaders inside the Roman Catholic Church are also gay, and either deeply closeted and tortured, or using homophobia as a way to get ahead and "throw people off the scent;" (4) the pervasive culture of dissembling about one's sexuality created space for abusers to operate; and (5) priority #1 is to protect the clerical culture and the associated closet, even if it means allowing abusers to do their thing.
Here's the problem, and it finally came into focus reading Alison's second piece and talking it through a bit with friend-of-the-blog Bill Lindsey. The whole purpose of the piece, I think, is to try to generate sympathy for the "good" closeted gay priests, the ones with partners who don't try to persecute anyone or push an agenda down anyone's throat, so that they are not scapegoated for the fallout around the abuse revelations. This is best summed up in a tidy paragraph in the first article:
An anecdotal illustration: a few years ago, I found myself leading a retreat for Italian gay priests in Rome. Of the nearly fifty participants some were single, some partnered, for others it was the first time they had ever been able to talk honestly with other priests outside the confessional. Among them there were seven or eight mid-level Vatican officials. I asked one from the Congregation for the Clergy what he made of those attending with their partners. He smiled and said, “Of course, we know that the partnered ones are the healthy ones.” Let that sink in. In the clerical closet, dishonesty is functional, honesty is dysfunctional, and the absence or presence of circumspect sexual practice between adult males is irrelevant.
Alison portrays this group in particular as folks who have become victims of a system that once was more-or-less good and has now turned cancerous. This is because, in Alison's telling, they have come to understand that what the Roman Catholic Church says about being gay is not true, and thus they entered and participated in celibate clergy life under false pretenses.
I understand, and even to a great degree agree, with this argument. My problem has to do with the remedy. If I may put on my lawyer hat for a moment, we can think of the relationship between a clergyperson and the church as a kind of a contract. Alison's argument is that the Roman Catholic Church induced gay men to agree to the contract by telling them that there was no legitimate or life-affirming expression of their sexuality anyway, so by "signing up" for celibacy they were in a sense not giving anything up. Let's stipulate that this is true. If you are induced under false pretenses to sign a contract, and you can prove it, the remedy is that you get to void the contract, and return to the status quo prior to the contract. What you don't get to do is unilaterally change the terms of the contract. So, I am 100% on-board with a gay priest saying "I now understand that I was induced to pledge or vow celibacy under false pretenses, and so I now feel myself free to leave the priesthood and enter into relationships notwithstanding those vows." But the "good" closeted gay priests are really saying "I now understand that I was induced to pledge or vow celibacy under false pretenses, and so I now feel myself free to simply ignore the vow or pledge of celibacy while still insisting on all of the privileges of being a priest under the current system." Whatever the circumstances under which you entered into the contract, you had to understand that you were pledging to be celibate. You don't get to simply write that line out of the agreement.
And this is where the emotional labor part comes in. I am very sympathetic to the emotional conflict suffered by gay men in the context of the Roman Catholic priesthood. I have seen it first-hand. But ultimately navigating that turmoil is the responsibility of the individual priest himself. Leaving is a perfectly valid solution to the turmoil; so is staying, publicly stating your truth, fighting for change, and accepting whatever consequences come from that advocacy; so, as well, is deciding that you are going to be bound by what you have promised and you are committed to seeing it through one way or another. All of those solutions involve taking responsibility for your own emotional state and well-being. But unilaterally opting yourself out of the requirement of celibacy and (consciously or subconsciously) using the power of the institution to cover up your decision while leaving everyone else out in the cold is externalizing the costs of your emotional turmoil on other people--especially LGBT lay people who are still subject to the rules and their consequences from which the priest has successfully immunized himself. That decision is profoundly narcissistic and self-serving, taking all the benefits without bearing any of the costs. In a very real way, they are making LGBT lay people take on their emotional labor and bear their burdens.
So what I am saying is that I have come to realize that I actually have very little sympathy for the "good" closeted priests, and in a real way have less sympathy for them than I do for the tortured inquisitors. See, the tortured ones are tortured because they have internalized a pathological understanding of their own self and their own sexuality. The demons have gotten to them, and in my book they have something in the nature of an insanity defense. But these "good" closeted priests have no such excuse. The tortured ones are sick, but the "good" ones are cynical, and I can deal with sick much more readily than I can deal with cynical.
If it were just the internal psycho-drama, that would be one thing. But all of this comes with the back drop of the fact that some of the stuff that this system is keeping under wraps is not just Priest A and Priest B being partners, but also Priest X raping children and Priest Y coercing or harassing people into unwanted sexual encounters. Understand that since at least 2002, and truthfully for much, much longer, the "good" gay priests have known perfectly well that they are participating in a system that facilitated, and continues to facilitate, the abuse and exploitation of children and adults. In the face of this reality, and with full knowledge of the consequences that this system they created has on wholly innocent parties, they have chosen to do nothing. "Well, I know 'Uncle Teddy' preys on seminarians who are wholly dependent on him for their career (and kids, as it turns out), but if I say anything it might blow up my spot and jeopardize my cushy set up with my partner, so tough shit for those seminarians." That's the reality of what the "good" gay priests have been doing for the last 30 years. They have decided that protecting a system is more important than the lives and well-being of real people--and they don't actually believe in the predicate tenets of the system anyway. It's all well and good that, as Alison says, the "knowing clerical gay milieu is genuinely shocked and baffled when minors are involved," but that "shock" and "bafflement" translated into them doing jack shit for the those who were harmed.
And for what? These guys could live with their chosen partners in broader society freely, subject only to the remaining harassment inflicted by the conservative elements of the culture (conservative elements which the organization that they represent work hard to support and encourage, by the way). If they want to stay in ordained ministry, they can walk down the street to anyone of a number of other churches who would likely take them in. There are many avenues for these men to live with integrity, and without having to participate and facilitate the system that has done so much damage. But, again, those avenues require these men to take responsibility for their own emotional well-being and integrity, and that is a kind of emotional labor. Staying in the closeted confines is much easier, and so that's what they in the main have chosen to do. No matter what the consequences to others.
And into this mix, here comes Alison implying that it is somehow the laity's responsibility to create conditions under which these gay priests can have a soft landing from the mess they have created for themselves:
Nevertheless, it is only when straightforward, and obviously true, Christian messaging like Francis’ becomes normal among the laity themselves that honesty can become the norm among the clergy. Otherwise we will continue with the absurd and pharisaical current situation in which there is one rule for the clergy (“doesn’t matter what you do so long as you don’t say so in public or challenge the teaching”) and another for the laity, passed off as “the teaching of the Church”, and brutally enforced, for instance, among employees of Catholic schools, parish organists, softball coaches and the like.
Only when it is clear (as it is increasingly) that the laity are quite confident in the (obviously true) view that “if you are this way, then learning to love appropriately is going to flow from, not despite, this” will it be possible to change, without scandal, the formal rules regarding the clergy.
Sorry, no. This is not the laity's problem, nor the laity's responsibility to create a "soft landing" to facilitate clergy becoming untangled from the ropes they have tied themselves in. This is exactly the kind of thing that people who talk about women doing forced emotional labor complain about--creating an emotional crisis and then turning to the other person expecting them to soothe and turn the temperature down. It has become abundantly clear to everyone who has eyes to see that the "abuse crisis" is a clergy problem, and so the clergy need to get their house in order, and stop blaming others or looking for the laity to throw them a lifeline.
If you are a gay Roman Catholic priest who is with a partner and thinks that there is nothing wrong with that, then the right thing to do is to say so, right now, publicly. And, while doing so, it would be nice for you to express some contrition for the fact that you sat around and said nothing when other partnered LGBT folks were thrown under the bus by the Roman Catholic church. But, in any event, the time for honesty, full honesty, is now. Not when you feel affirmed by the laity, or feel safe, or when there are no potential consequences for your honesty, but now. Take responsibility for your emotional state and integrity, do the right thing, and be honest. Stop imposing the emotional costs of your sexuality on other people.
Do I believe this will happen? Absolutely not. Not unless the laity demands it, and I don't really see how the laity could actually demand it. I am afraid that many of those who are (justifiably, utterly so) angry and demanding action are going to learn the lesson that I learned at a Baptism outside of Philadelphia--the Roman Catholic Church is the clergy's show, and you have no power to do anything other than leave. And for all of the reasons set forth in Alison's two pieces, the clergy have come up with a formula that works for them, and they are going to ride that train for as long as it will carry them.
The, again wholly justified, anger that you see in the broader Roman Catholic sphere, cutting across political and theological orientations, is the result of the laity being forced to do emotional labor for the clergy for two generations. People are fed up, and they should be fed up.
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