Robert Downey Jr. Doppelgänger Writes About Fr. Geoffrey Farrow - A Gay Priest Fighting Against Prop 8

Steve Lopez, the journalist perhaps most famous for being played by Robert Downey Jr. in That Movie You’re Never Going To See, has written a thought-provoking piece on a gay priest currently at odds with the Catholic Church. Father Geoffrey Farrow of Fresno, California is an outspoken opponent of Proposition 8 and is an openly gay Catholic priest. That’s an amusing party trick.

Farrow moved to South Florida from Cuba when he was 4 years old, and dated girls when he was young to “keep up appearances.” After the Vietnam War and plagued with questions at to how so much bad could exist alongside with God, he flirted with athiesm and agnosticism, but they didn’t fulfill quite like a belief in God had:

“I have a hunger for the transcendent,” Farrow said. “This is too precise,” he said of man and the universe, “to be a coincidence.” And so he became a believer, once more, in the church he had been “carried to in diapers.”

When I told Farrow that as an agnostic, I don’t understand that leap, he described God as love and faith as trust.

“Trust is fundamental of all human relationships,” he said. “Part of the attraction of the relationship with that person is that you’re always familiar with them and yet always discovering them.”

I love and trust my wife, I said, but she’s real and doesn’t need to prove that she exists.

“Precisely,” Farrow said with a smile, as if I’d described his relationship with God.

Farrow eventually joined a seminary while still closeted, a fact which prompted Lopz to ask him a question we often have when learning of gay Catholic priests:

Is it possible, I asked, that becoming a priest was a way of avoiding coming to terms with his sexuality? Farrow had, after all, once prayed to God to “please make me normal, please make me normal.”

“That’s a valid question,” he said, but he believes he was addressing his spiritual rather than sexual identity in becoming a priest.

Regarding the question of whether the fact that his sexuality and the Church’s stance on homosexuality are at odds, Father Farrow gives the answer that’s probably not uncommon for many Catholics. Or Republicans today:

“I’m not happy with the current administration,” Farrow said, “but I haven’t shredded my passport.”

And, with that in mind, he made a vow to fight against Proposition 8, a mission he saw as in line with his faith, if not necessarily with his religion. It’s nice to have a poster boy for the opposition, what with Eduardo Verástegui hogging the Prop 8 Debate spotlight while wearing a baby cheetah:

“I am morally compelled to vote no on Proposition 8,” he told his congregation, saying he had to break “a numbing silence” about church prejudice against homosexuals.

Among the critics in his own parish and beyond, there are those who quote the Bible to condemn homosexuality and gay marriage.

“The Bible is not a book, it’s a library written over 15 centuries,” Farrow told me, suggesting that Christianity has and should continue to evolve. “People who approach scripture in a literal fashion are attempting to manipulate God himself.”

This is so interesting to us because, very recently, we had a discussion in which we were asked why we believe what we do and how we could ever defend an institution with such an ongoing history of corruption and intolerance as the Catholic Church. And our answer was simple: Any earthly manifestation of the spiritual is only as strong or as good as the people who comprise it. It’s a living thing, really, that grows and changes as time goes on and society evolves. That is not to say that the core message of a religion alters beyond recognition - the doctrines that build the walls around it and present a facade to the public merely get refurbished from time to time. And we’re very, very glad that Father Farrow is among those doing the refurbishing.

Also, if you’re interested, Fr. Farrow has his own blog. Send him a little love, yeah?

Gay priest is true to his faith, at odds with his church [LA Times]