c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.)

(UNDATED) This year’s John the Baptist Award goes to the Rev. Donald Cozzens of Cleveland.

Like the famed prophet, Cozzens has, in his new book, “The Changing Face of the Priesthood,” proclaimed hard but upsetting truths about the American priesthood.

Telling the truth, even as gently as he does, is always dangerous and some officials may yet ask for his head on a platter. He deserves our support just as his book deserves to be read by all those interested in the healthy stability of Catholicism in America.

Cozzens’ title, “president-rector” of St. Mary’s Seminary in Cleveland, reflects the overlapping ages and cultures of the priesthood in this country. He is experienced enough to recall American Catholicism when, like Switzerland in Europe, it lived its own energetic life walled away from the heavily Protestant host culture.

In that Latin Mass heyday, seminaries had “rectors” and followed Roman rules that separated them from the educational enterprise of the country. Priests were honored figures everywhere in the Catholic culture. Bing Crosby’s movie portrayal of Father Chuck O’Malley, as Cozzens observes, epitomized the open, manly and trustworthy American priest.

Now, however, after Vatican Council II opened Catholics to the world, seminaries have “presidents” and comply at the highest levels with the accrediting demands of the nation’s educational system.

Somewhere in that long and difficult transition, the manly Father O’Malley image was retired and replaced, first by that of the wimpish priest chaplain on the sitcom “M-A-S-H,” and later by the tortured central figure in “Priest.”

These characterizations reflected the real-time, real-life transformations under way among the Catholic clergy. More than 20,000 sought permission to leave the priesthood and marry, perhaps radically altering, as Cozzens suggests, the heterosexual balance among American priests.

In the mid-1980s, this deconstruction of a confident, masculine priesthood was accelerated by what can be described as nothing less than the explosion of the sex abuse scandal among its members.

Cozzens is one of the thousands of faithful American priests who rode out the storms and oversaw the implementation of the decrees of Vatican II in American parish life. He would be embarrassed to be called a hero but, as a seminary official and a vicar who worked closely with priests during this period, he has upheld the ideals that all Catholics cherish in their priests.

He now caps his career with a book that, calmly and wisely, surveys and addresses the many questions that have surfaced, some painful and others puzzling, about what has happened to Catholic priests and seminarians.

Cozzens is a man troubled by the ambivalence, emotional and sexual, that has surfaced in the clergy, but he is a master at taking an untroubled look at it. This book is the product of a good confessor who listens carefully, is not easily scandalized and never panics, and who calls for understanding and healing rather than sackcloth and ashes.

He explores the question of whether the priesthood has, for a variety of factors, become homosexualized _ chosen by men attracted to male companionship and for whom celibacy is not a serious obstacle. Citing several estimates by experts of the large number of homosexuals in the priesthood, he explores this in relationship to the “integrity” of both priesthood and church.

He recognizes that many gays are wonderful priests but he is not unaware of the chronic denial and secrecy, both on the part of the church and priests, that make a true assessment of their impact difficult.

He reflects, from his long experience, on the impact that a predominantly gay culture has on heterosexuals who may feel as out of place and different as gays find themselves in the larger society. This is vastly complicated, he notes, by “seminary faculties which include a disproportionate number of homosexually oriented persons.” A significant gay subculture, he concludes, is a “serious challenge to the unity and integrity of the community.”

Cozzens is learned enough to understand that questions about the long-range effects of a largely gay clergy are not new. What he does, bravely and thoroughly, is to ask this long-avoided and unanswered question out loud in a broader context of sensible reflections on recruitment and training.

This book deserves wide reading in the Catholic community because the author’s own health undergirds every page and paragraph. That unmistakable ingredient invests this breakthrough book with the integrity of its author who is pastor here to the church and the priesthood he clearly loves.

DEA END KENNEDY