“Who here wants to be a saint?”

Instinctively everyone shifted uncomfortably. Our high school youth group would have a weekly small group meeting in someone’s home on Tuesday nights and this is how our leader decided to kick things off.

Several in the group, sitting on the floor around a coffee table of mom-made appetizers half raised their hands. It seemed like that was the right answer. This may have been the Donnely’s house, but it was still technically church. Then again, being a saint is kind of intense. Don’t they usually die early? Get statues? What teenager says they want a church named after them one day?

“I want to be St. Patrick of Flower Mound,” I said, with a truly unfortunate confidence. Flower Mound isn’t the most attractive town name in the world, and as soon as the words escaped my lips I realized I would probably have to go do my great works elsewhere, if nothing else, for aesthetic reasons. But the sincerity of my statement was there. I wanted to do what it took to become one of the greats.

Our small group leader beamed. That was the answer he was looking for. Being a saint — the recognized, official kind — is no small feat. For us Catholics, it’s the highest honor we’ve got.

It means you not only did the religious stuff right, but you are worth setting up as an example for everyone to come. George Weigel, the conservative Catholic writer puts it this way -

The Church doesn’t canonize saints for their sake. God takes quite good care of his holy ones, we may be sure, and being ‘raised to the dignity of the altars,’ as the old phrase had it, does nothing for those so raised. No, the Church canonizes saints for our sake, so that we might have models who inspire us to be the holy ones we must be, if we’re to fulfill our Christian and human destiny.

At seventeen I was ready to give every fiber of my being to God and fulfill my destiny. I had a young, if passionate relationship with God and saw the Church’s ideals as noble and worthwhile as anything else I could imagine. If I was going to bother being Catholic, why not go all in? Why not become a saint?

I grew up with the easy, if peculiar, Catholic parlance of praying to special saints for given intentions. St. Anthony was most commonly invoked in our home — patron saint of lost things. St. Christopher would keep safe our travels. St. Cecilia for music when learning a new instrument. They watched over and guided our everyday lives.

In seminary I grew into Weigel’s understanding of the saints. They were more than who to seek out when you’re in a bind, they were prescriptions to avoid getting stuck. A priest once gave the only sermon I remember in detail from my three and a half years there about St. Isidore, patron saint of farmers. He had no illusions that any of us would take up the trade, but he said, most of us would one day have congregants who were farmers. We had better learn from Isidore’s life and begin to ask for his prayers now if we wanted to know how to best take care of those parishioners one day.

We learned to study the lives of the saints and sift through their histories for pieces that could apply to us. Which ones came from families that looked like ours. Which ones lived in similar political or ecclesial times. Who had some of our own personality flaws. Who had some our strengths. Sometimes people start looking for a modern label that past generations never saw fit to ascribe.

There have long been rumors of which saints might be gay. Looking through old letters between close friends and confidants however and ascribing sexual attraction to what is merely intimacy is as baseless as it is unprovable. But two priests or nuns writing to one another with a confidence that seems foreign to our emotionally stunted texting-as-sole-communication doesn’t imply sexuality, just maturity.

And more to the point, anytime someone decides to ascribe a queer sexuality to a saint, it is always with a see these two were surely lovers sense of imagination. Saint fan fiction. But it is never someone who is gay, and living according to the Church’s orders of celibacy.

So it begs the question I have to ask my fellow Catholics — where is the gay saint?

Oh, I know there were countless individuals through the ages who silently took up their mandate of single celibacy on behalf of their sexual attractions and their Church. But, really, where are they? In two thousand years the Catholic Church has found not one that it could celibrate? Not one life among the millions it could say God has raised up as an example for the rest of us?

If that is the purpose of the saints — to be a holy witness through the fog of time for how we should live our lives today — then their absence is truly remarkable. I can think of only two reasons no such saint should exist. One is human, the other is divine.

Prejudice within the Church made the lives of these faithful few taboo and embarrassing. God wanted to showcase their lives, but the idea of publicizing an “inherently disordered” sexuality, repressed and celibate though it may be, was too much for Vatican officials in centuries past. God has never wanted to celebrate and make eternal examples of mandated celibacy in gay lives.

What other explanations are there? We have a patron saint of undertakers but not a single one for the gays?

Photo by Patrick Schneider on Unsplash

For every situation that is morally difficult for a Catholic there is a saint. That is, as Weigel points out, their biggest purpose. To guide us in these moments common and rare. Mothers expecting a difficult childbirth?— there is St. Gianna. Priest being forced to give up the details of the confessional? — St. John Nepomucene. Mom try to drown you in a river? Did you accidentally murder your parents? Born into slavery? There are pacifists. Warriors. Kings. Queens. Workers. Beggars. My patron saint is a man who was made a bishop basically against his will and was martyred instead of turning his back on the duties of his new office.

Yet there is not a single one who realized they were attracted to the same sex and devoted themselves to a life of celibacy outside of holy orders?

I don’t believe there is a celibate gay saint because God doesn’t actually demand celibacy of us. The burden is on church members who would demand it of us to answer this question honestly — in two thousand years, can you show us a time where it worked? Point to someone’s actual life you want me to emulate. You could show me what to do if a king made me a bishop so that he could control me and tax the Church to fund his war with France, but there is no one in two millennia that was gay and celibate and lived a life worthy of example?

Because if God isn’t actually raising up such lives, then based on what do you demand it of us? And upon what grounds do you so easily dismiss us when we say it doesn’t work?

That there has never been a gay saint, though, does not mean that there won’t one day be one. One day God will raise up a queer son or daughter from the Church and they will be an example for us. Of healthy marriage. Of raising beautiful children. Of love and sacrifice and devotion.

The fact is, these people are already in your pews. They are ready to be a witness for the rest of us. But they may not be the ones raising their hands when the Church asks, “who wants to be a saint?” They are too modest for that. They just want to do life right.