A Forbidden Kiss

My Struggle with Celibacy and Desire in the Catholic Church

Hi there,

I’m up against time today so, rather than write something new, it makes sense for me to republish an extract from my first memoir. Without further comment, here it is:

Dare to be me before God and man,’ my 21-year-old self journaled on 21 April 1983; a challenge (minus the god bit) for me today too, in my late 50s, as I write this.

A couple of days later, at spiritual direction, I felt ‘battle sore and weary, buffeted and bashed’.

‘The struggle continues,’ said my director, after I had confessed my ‘sins’, chief among them, I’m guessing at this remove, playing with myself; and my anguish at the guilt of hating my mother. I was cold and distant from her, the new norm in our relationship. It wasn’t getting any better. I was uncomfortable talking about it.

‘The area of common ground,’ my spiritual director observed, ‘is dwindling all the time. It’s not just a problem of relationship but it involves your very self too.’

My infatuation for my confrère reached its zenith twelve nights later in his room. Possibly after sharing my angst about my mother, we had extended, naïve hugging, then he stripped naked and got into bed. Let’s allow the journal take up the actual account:

I desired him greatly. I wanted to touch him and was glad he turned on the light before he was beneath his continental quilt. Already in my pyjamas, I lay beside him: he beneath the quilt, I, to his left, above it. We did not touch. But desire was flowing between us. We dared to look at each other. Our eyes, our faces, were so very close. I barely dared look in his eyes.

Making to go, though I not for a moment wished to, he said: ‘Wait just a while.’ I interpreted all as invitation.

Despite the melodramatic Mills and Boon tone of all that, what transpired was nothing more than a few short kisses between two human beings desperately longing for affection and intimacy in an all-male celibate world.

I wanted to be a priest but I had never wanted to be celibate. It was a cruel unnatural man-made part of the package. Saint Peter, the first Pope, was married. And for more than half of the Church’s history there was a married clergy. Today there are tens of thousands of priests who are prohibited from exercising their priesthood because they fell in love and got married – the Church elevating what it admits to be the man-made rule of compulsory celibacy over what it claims to be the God-given vocation to the priesthood.

It was, as far as I can remember, my first time ever to kiss anyone on the lips, male or female; apart from the time my Uncle John had kissed me chastely, affectionately and briefly in the company of my parents.

I am not gay and I don’t think that my confrère was either; but I yearned for intimacy. I journaled that if he had stripped naked in front of me again, I wasn’t sure if I might ‘feel powerless to resist him’. Had he done so I feared I might ‘collapse in his embrace’. Observing my desire, I concluded my journal entry: ‘Seemingly, all flesh, this day.’

Struck by a sense of powerlessness over my passions, I tried to pray and found solace in the classic spiritual text The Imitation of Christ, Book III, chapter 55: ‘O Lord, while I delight in your law, and see Your commands as holy, yet in my body I sin, obeying my senses. So, while I have the will to do good, I am powerless to do so.’

I wondered whether I could live a celibate life. At spiritual direction two days later, on 7 May, I told my director everything and let him read my journal.

He said desire must not be suppressed but neither should it be acted upon. He suggested I go for a short walk with my confrère in daylight hours, acknowledge the intimacy enjoyed but that we should not repeat it lest it led us to ‘very serious sin’. We were not to visit one another’s rooms at night nor spend an inordinate amount of time together. I was to apply myself more to study and prayer and spread myself more in the community.

My spiritual director said that this was a good experience for me. Many would never encounter it and be the poorer for it. He did not at all see it as standing against me for religious life. Rather, it was necessary that celibacy became more real for me. I was being tugged in opposing directions: between a glimpse of what marriage could be like and the lonely life of a celibate.

From Joe Armstrong’s In My Gut, I Don’t Believe, Book 1 of his memoir series From Belief to Unbelief. The second volume, Saved by a Woman, will be published on 7 November 2023. You can buy Book 1 and/or order Book 2 on the links below.