LGBT ICON

The bleeding heart

Henri Nouwen was the gay Catholic role model you never had.

iqbalartwork

Between 1969 to 1996, when he died, a Dutch Catholic priest became one of the most famous people on the planet. To millions he was the image of a caring cleric, writing on themes like love, intimacy, depression. “People felt like they knew more about him than they actually did,” notes Michael Ford. He’d met Henri Nouwen, loved his books—startled to learn, when beginning a biography, that Nouwen was gay.

I’m reading Ford’s 1999 book, Wounded Prophet, thinking about the writer who now seem like the author of a vast epic about a lonely gay priest who’s less and less sure about Catholic theology . . . talking, talking, talking to fill up the terrible silences.

Nouwen (pronounced ‘Now-un’) was born in 1932 in the Netherlands, and was ordained as a Jesuit in 1957. He made the unusual step of training in clinical psychology, in America, to study how religion affected people. It made him something between priest and psychologist, neither and both.

Whatever his subject is, it always seems to be himself. I’m browsing his first book, Intimacy (1969). “His depression makes him tired, and his fatigue makes him depressed, and so on.” Is that a discussion of generic priests, or him?