I once sat in on a meeting of Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, one of the many 12-step programs that flowed out of Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1990’s, an era when baby-boomers, like myself, had reached their middle years and were taking stock. The room was full of about 30 men — it was a Men’s Only Meeting, a popular format in the sex programs, which nevertheless had large numbers of women, as well — and most of these men were rock-solid AA recovery stories. Having gotten sober, they were now confronting the underlying issues that they had used alcohol and drugs to medicate.

There was a famous face in the room, a network newsman who was a bona fide stud-muffin and I spent a lot of that meeting checking him out — how did he laugh, how did he listen (intently and hunched forward, in his beautiful suit and tie, as I had seen him do many times during on-air interviews). But it was not this encounter with fame that left the most vivid impression. It was the presence of two priests at the meeting — in itself, an anomaly — both dressed in street clothes, who in their various ways (one overtly, one in a darker more covert way) shared the struggles they were having with unpriestly, high-octane libidos.

Knowing what I did of devout, head-in-the-clouds Catholicism, it was a jolt that two Catholic priests of my generation would ever put a spotlight on their sexuality. As it turned out, they were both ordered by their bishops to get help after certain affairs at their parishes spun way out of control. I think of them today in the wake of a new Inquisition — a purge of gay priests by the Vatican — that is whipping into high gear, as reported in the New York Times :

Investigators appointed by the Vatican have been instructed to review each of the 229 Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States for “evidence of homosexuality” and for faculty members who dissent from church teaching, according to a document prepared to guide the process.

…[T]he American archbishop who is supervising the seminary review said last week that “anyone who has engaged in homosexual activity or has strong homosexual inclinations,” should not be admitted to a seminary … [and] that the restriction should apply even to those who have not been sexually active for a decade or more.

American seminaries are under Vatican review as a result of the sexual abuse scandal that swept the priesthood in 2002 … The issue of gay seminarians and priests has been in the spotlight because a study commissioned by the church found last year that about 80 percent of the young people victimized by priests were boys.

Of the two priests who spoke at that SCA meeting, the first one was having trouble … with women. I was surprised. Like the archbishops who are now requiring seminarians to take heterosexual loyalty oaths, I assumed most priests were gay. A product of Catholic grammar and high schools, I came to the same conclusion commonly held by my classmates — though I had never been touched, or so much as propositioned by a priest.

My surmise was based on simple observation — my teenage gaydar being quite accurate, however embarrassed and closeted I was about it at the time. I saw clearly how the priesthood called some of my more idealistic, less sexually connected classmates. In certain large Irish families, in fact, it was almost a tradition that at least one son would be “sacrificed” to the church.

The way it usually worked, a boy, susceptible to the church’s anti-masturbation, anti-sex-in-general message, went directly from Catholic high school into the seminary. If the boy happened to be gay, he embraced the seminary as drowning men embrace lifesavers, with the conviction that between being homosexual and being sexless — as lifelong celibacy in effect rendered you – sexless was better.

Among the more self-aware seminarians, the ones whose gaydar, like mine, was working overtime but who seemed to have more deeply drunk the Kool-Aid, giving up sexuality was imagined to be ennobling. I have no doubt that many of these men have lived, and are living now, lives of celibacy. Human beings can do incredible things when they put their minds to it — waging war on nature included.

Is being a lifelong celibate, after all, any more “unnatural” than say, being a professional dancer? Young dancers regularly twist their bodies into shapes that go against the fiber of tendons and bone. It is, in fact, an expected commonplace that dancers will spend their later years virtually crippled or in need of spinal surgery.

What many young seminarians refuse to address — unlike young dancers — is that a life of defying nature has a steep price, paid in the currency of mental and physical health. Discipline is required — also passion, and not, as commonly assumed, an absence of feeling. But when you’re brought up on mystical blood and crucifixion, sacrifice seems a plus. Still, how many blossoming gay boys, at age 17, have a serious idea of what it will require to maintain a sexless state throughout their sex-on-the-brain-every-10-seconds prime?

Friendships happen. Love happens. Life in a seminary, abuzz with healthy young testosterone, is a life, for all, of self-denial. A life in which sex, always a sin outside of marriage, is particularly abject and disavowed for a man married to Mother Church.

And so as I sat at that SCA meeting I got an earful from the priest who was smitten with a string of female parishioners, one of whom had the provocative habit of always turning up in intimate surroundings when she and the priest would be alone and unobserved. He told his story with great pain and authenticity, the sort of grim resolve of someone pulling himself up a sheer cliff face.

By contrast, the second priest was all shallow smiles and off-topic jokes, pious recovery slogans and feel-good generalizations and not one word of anything personal, not one hint of why he he had been ordered by his superiors into a program for sexual compulsives. Everything was “by the grace of God” this and “keep it simple” that, bubbling, winking until every bullshit detector in the room was going off like car alarms.

My suspicions about this happy-go-lucky priest were confirmed when he cornered me after the meeting, telling me there was something special and spiritual about me, he could see it in my eyes, and did I know (since I had shared a tale wallpapered from floor to ceiling with man-on-man sex) that there was an organization for gay Catholics called –

“Ex-Catholic,” I corrected.

“… Courage,” he finished, naming a notoriously phobic outfit. Yes, I had heard of this lame ex-Gay ministry and took great delight in snapping his head off with a ready answer.

“Right, they’ll give me God, as long as I deny the entire emotional legitimacy of my life — You can not be serious.” Later as I replayed this delicious episode in my head, I added a swaggering “Well, this faggot’s not for burning.”

Very happy with myself I was. I had scored a point off the church that had stopped loving me. No, it would soon dawn on me, I had scored a point off a complete and total cripple. For it would take months and months of stray meetings and grudging hellos before I finally heard the priest’s story from his own lips.

Gone were the jokes and smiles. He sat in a puddle of self-pity at a meeting held, fittingly, in a shabby rectory that smelt of mothballs, telling how a crafty, over-the-hill hustler and freelance bodega robber had attempted to blackmail him, sending the priest immediately to his monsignor with a full and contrite confession, determined to nip this thing in the bud — his AA sobriety had given him enough sharp clarity to do that.

Yet instead of the tough-love and stern slap on the wrist he had expected, that the straight priest had gotten for his hot tumble, the gay priest was stripped of his parish, barred from performing mass and shuttled off from one “retreat” house to another, the fate of senile, incurable or fatally reprobate priests.

The man he had fucked with, I should add, was no parish child but a con-artist sunk well into his greasy 30’s.

Two priests. Same problem. But only one was treated as a pariah. Only one was beyond the pale. And only one was gay.

Today, the Catholic Church imagines it has a crisis with its gay priests. It has, in fact, a crisis with what longtime Vatican-watcher Gary Wills calls its “bad faith” toward the entire spectrum of human sexuality, a flinty distrust that begins with its celibacy requirements for priests and its equation of holiness with sexlessness.

The Times continues: “Expectation for such a [gay purge] rose this year with the election of Pope Benedict XVI, who has spoken of the need to ‘purify’ the church. It is unknown how many Catholic priests are gay. Estimates range widely, from 10 percent to 60 percent.” In this context, the Times repeats an oft-heard caveat:

Experts in human sexuality have cautioned that homosexuality and attraction to children are different, and that a disproportionate percentage of boys may have been abused because priests were more likely to have access to male targets — like altar boys or junior seminarians — than to girls.

This is a dishonest gloss. This is not a responsible assessment of what was going on. These priests were homosexual. Most of them were involved with boys in their teens — that is, nearly grown men. Pedophiles are attracted to children and usually make no distinction between the sexes — the body of a little boy being not very different from that of a little girl.

The priest in these cases employed cunning and opportunism, often insinuating themselves into the family life of recently widowed young mothers. As a spare, unattached male — one consecrated to God — the priest was above suspicion, giving him nearly as much access to budding girls as boys … or, in fact, to the young widow herself. But it was boys who were the overwhelming target — 80% to quote the Times. This is simply a fact. We’ll get nowhere by denying that. This is plainly a crime of homosexual predators.

That said, the Catholic Church has chosen to believe that theirs is a crisis primarily caused by the perhaps 60% majority of gay priests in their midst, rather than a byproduct of the church’s blinkered war on sex, its entrance requirement to the priesthood geared for only the most extraordinary — or desperate — sexual profiles.

The men who committed these crimes are no more typical of gay men than of gay priests. To understand this, the Catholic Church would have to examine the mote in its own eye. Instead it has cast its gaze on the usual suspects.

It was not lost on me that of the two priests with sex addictions, the one who was gay had to go around and around the mountain for months before he could even begin to climb it, or simply acknowledge in a closed Men’s Only Meeting what that mountain was.