RIGHTS-SPAIN: Gay Priest Stages Rebellion

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Feb 5 2002 (IPS) - Roman Catholic priest José Mantera has triggered an avalanche of support for “sexual freedom” in Spain’s Catholic Church by coming out of the closet. While the Church hierarchy has threatened to suspend him, he has won the support of his fellow townspeople and a number of church groups.

Mantera, 39, became a priest at age 24, and remained celibate until he was 31, when he fell in love with another man. Last Friday he became famous overnight by publishing, in a gay magazine, an article in which he admitted that he is gay, and stated that homosexuality is a right.

Mantera is the latest in a wave of people including politicians, artists and even military officers, who have come out of the closet in Spain.

The list includes singers Miguel Bosé, Lluis Llach and Chavela Vargas, dancer/choreographer Nacho Duato, politicians Jerónimo Saavedra and Francisco Javier Núñez, writers Eduardo Mendicutti, Terenci Moix, Lucía Etxebarria and Juan Goytisolo, world-famous film director Pedro Almodóvar and lieutenant-colonel José María Sánchez Silva.

Mantera is the parish priest of Valverde del Camino, a town of 12,000 in the southwestern province of Huelva, where reactions have varied.

While the local townspeople and two priests who work with him in the parish came out to say they understood and supported him, the bishops of Huelva announced Monday that he would likely be suspended “a divinis” – in other words, he would be banned from exercising the priesthood.

The bishops said Mantera should have been “brave” by abandoning the Church when he decided to admit to being gay.

Bishop Juan José Asenjo, spokesman for the Episcopal Conference, the highest-level body of the Catholic Church in Spain, dubbed homosexuality as “a sin and a moral disorder.” Another bishop, Gea Escolano, said Mantera was “sick,” and likened sexual relations between persons of the same sex to conditions like deafness and blindness.

But the president of the John XXIII Association of Theologians, Enrique Miret Magdalena, said homosexuality was an “option” that merited respect.

The Movement in Favour of Optional Celibacy (MOCEOP) also came out in Mantera’s defence. The movement demands “the same rights for homosexuals and heterosexuals within the Church.” It groups more than 5,000 former Spanish priests who were suspended after they married.

MOCEOP holds that it is possible to be gay and a believer who lives up to his or her Christian duties at the same time.

José María González Ruiz, 84, a theologian who has oriented several generations of Catholics in Spain, says the Church should never have condemned homosexuality, which is “not a vice, but a reality, just like being blond or brunette.”

There are also those who complain of hypocrisy on the part of the Catholic Church hierarchy. Carlos Alberto Biendicho, president of the Popular Gay Platform and a militant member of the governing centre-right Popular Party, threatened Sunday to “out” three gay bishops if the Church takes reprisals against Mantera.

Another gay rights activist, Juan José Brosch, the coordinator of the Christian Group of Gays and Lesbians of Valencia, said “Jesus himself made no mention of homosexuality, which means he didn’t consider it a problem.”

Mantera’s decision, Brosch added, “is a first step towards starting to fight against the Church’s hypocrisy and double moral standards.”

Other parish priests from nearby dioceses expressed solidarity with Mantera, like Manuel Cirilo in El Villar, who said he respected Mantera’s sexual option as well as his decision to make it public, because “each person is a mystery, and no one has the right to judge anyone.”

Mantera, meanwhile, has been forced to leave town and take refuge in a modest hotel in Madrid to flee the scores of reporters hounding him for an interview.

But he has not evaded the situation. On Monday, he published an article in the daily EL Mundo, in which he wondered “where was everyone” when he and others denounced the exploitative conditions in which employees of footwear sweatshops worked in his parish, and no one did anything.

“Deep Spain” – in other words, the traditional, conservative Spain – throws a fit when a priest announces that he is gay, but does nothing to support the same priest’s demands that the labour rights of workers be respected, wrote Mantera.

That Spain “is the one that pardons and tolerates the underlying injustice of the underground economy,” but “feels terrible panic in the face of simply human urges, in the face of the temptation of someone – of many, thank God – to live the way they know how, or simply the way they want to,” he added.

Mantera pointed out that in the marriage ceremony, he does not use the traditional phrase “man and wife” but refers to “the union of the human couple.”

Mantera has his own website (www.pepemantero.tuweb.net) and is determined to keep speaking out, saying he was taught that the truth set people free.

“This is my truth. The Church inculcates us with a guilt complex regarding everything that gives us pleasure. I want to fight against that,” he said, while the ranks of those who support him continue to grow.