NEW YORK (RNS) The Rev. Robert Carter, an openly gay Jesuit priest who spent decades fighting for gay rights both within and outside the Catholic Church, is being remembered as a pioneering political and social activist.

Carter, co-founder of the National Gay Task Force and the New York City chapter of the gay Catholic group Dignity, died Feb. 22 of a neurological illness at his home at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution. He was 82.

Carter publicly announced his homosexuality in the early 1970s and was known for wearing his clerical collar at early New York City gay pride parades.

“To my knowledge, I was the first priest to (come out publicly),” Carter wrote in an unpublished memoir. “This was the central event in my work for gay and lesbian liberation, the single most important action of my life.”

In an obituary that appeared in the Gay City News, a New York newspaper, journalist Andy Humm noted that Carter survived repeated calls for his expulsion from the Jesuits by explaining that he believed “he was acting in the true spirit of Jesus by coming out and working with people rejected by society.”

Humm, who called Carter a “foot soldier” in the early gay rights movement, noted that when his Jesuit superiors barred him from saying Mass for Dignity, Carter “agonized over whether to accept the restriction; in Jesuitical fashion, he regularly traveled to Philadelphia to say Mass for the chapter there” — outside his superior’s jurisdiction.”

Bernard Lynch, a fellow Catholic priest who also advised Dignity during its early years, recalled when Carter publicly chastised the late Cardinal John O`Connor in 1985 for opposing a city anti-discrimination policy because homosexuality was “a threat to the family `as God had ordained.”‘

“What model of family is His Eminence talking about?” Lynch recalled Carter asking from the pulpit. “Mary a Virgin Mother? Joseph a Foster Father? Jesus their Son? I don’t know any family in New York like that. It would seem to me that straights are a far greater threat to this model of family, than we as gays ever were or could be.”

Carter, a Chicago native, was born in 1927 and converted to Catholicism in 1946. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he later earned a master’s degree and became a scholar on the early church. He was ordained a priest in 1962.