Catholic priests dying in America's hidden Aids epidemic

Roman Catholic priests in the United States are dying from Aids at least four times as fast as the general population, largely as a result of homosexual contact that the church hierarchy has anxiously sought to hush up, according to an extensive study published in the Kansas City Star.

Roman Catholic priests in the United States are dying from Aids at least four times as fast as the general population, largely as a result of homosexual contact that the church hierarchy has anxiously sought to hush up, according to an extensive study published in the Kansas City Star.

The newspaper, which began publishing a series of reports on Sunday, found medical records or family testimony on 100 priests who had died of Aids-related illnesses since the mid-Eighties, and second-hand evidence of another 200 deaths. Some experts put the total number of deaths as high as 1,000, out of a national Catholic priesthood of 46,000.

A survey sent out by the newspaper to 3,000 priests received 800 replies, many of them frank about the failings of the church to equip seminarians psychologically for their vow of chastity and to acknowledge the tragic consequences.

Nearly 60 per cent of respondents said they knew at least one priest who had died from an Aids-related illness, and one in three said they knew priests who were either ill with Aids symptoms or HIV-positive. "I think this speaks to a failure on the part of the church," Thomas Gumbleton, an auxiliary bishop in Detroit, told the paper. "Gay priests and heterosexual priests didn't know how to handle their sexuality, their sexual drive... How to be celibate and to be gay at the same time, and how to be celibate and heterosexual at the same time, that's what we were never really taught how to do."

A gay priest, who responded to the survey anonymously, said: "I don't think the real problem is HIV-Aids but the basic dishonesty of the church with regard to all sexuality. Priests and others have to disguise and hide their sexuality in all sorts of ways and of course this leads to unhealthy sexual expression."

The high degree of HIV infection in the priesthood strikes at the core of Catholic doctrine, which preaches abstinence as the solution for nearly all sexual issues outside the confines of marriage. It is not entirely surprising, however, that thepriests were willing to talk to the Kansas City Star, since the American church has for many years been lobbying the Vatican - unsuccessfully - to loosen its zero-tolerance policies on safe sex, contraception, active homosexuality and other issues.

Both the Vatican and senior US church officials refused to comment on the findings.

According to the newspaper's research, the US church has increased its level of counselling on sexuality in seminaries and has now made an Aids test a requirement before ordination. But for years it applied pressure on doctors not to declare Aids or obvious Aids-related illnesses as the cause of death.

When Emerson Moore, a bishop of New York, died in a Minnesota hospice in 1995, his death certificate listed his occupation as "labourer" and said he died of "unknown natural causes". The cause of death was only changed to "HIV-related illness" following a formal complaint from a local Aids activist.