#acpe

me n the boys* (*plus mystic) as animal crossing villagers!!

Hello dear one! I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to reply to this message - it’s been a full few days for me.

So, I firstly want to preface all of this by saying that hospital chaplaincy is, as a profession, a very unique space that requires a unique skillset. While there are some similarities, being a professional, board-certified hospital chaplain is a very unique process as compared to being a prison chaplain, college chaplain, police chaplain, etc. If you haven’t already, I STRONGLY encourage you to take some time looking through the websites for the Association of Professional Chaplains, the National Association of Catholic Chaplains, and the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education. In sum, after your M. Div., you are then required to do a year-long Clinical Pastoral Education residency at a hospital, and after your residency you still need to work an additional 2,000 hours before applying for board certification (the process I’m in now, having finished my residency in August 2020) through either the Association of Professional Chaplains or National Association of Catholic Chaplains (or both, if you want to really go above and beyond). 

So, it’s a lengthy, challenging process - not gonna lie.

For me, getting an M. Div. was a fantastic experience. My divinity school had a diverse international body of lay students, religious sisters and brothers of many orders and congregations, and ordination-track students in the same cohort, so I studied, worked, and ministered alongside seminarians and priests throughout my M. Div. While there were no other openly-queer folx in my M.Div. cohort (besides my fiancé, lol, but that’s a different story...) there was a very solid community of us at the school in general (M.Div. students from other cohorts and folx in different graduate programs, such as MTS or PhD). We all met regularly for brunch, prayer, socializing, outings, educational presentations, and hosted a conference on queer theology once a year. (And, yes, this is a Catholic divinity school with an ecclesiastical faculty). 

During my M. Div., I did my first unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, which was an incredibly challenging but also fantastic experience. It felt like what I came to divinity school to do, the place where theology and spirituality could actually make a real, tangible difference in someone’s life at the darkest, hardest, most isolating moments. As scary and overwhelming as it was, it felt like my call to ministry - for now, and for this season in my life, at least.

At this point, the biggest potential hiccup in this process is getting endorsement from the Church, which is a necessary step in the board certification process. Since professional hospital chaplaincy in this country has historically been dominated by mainline Protestants (and still is, although this is changing slowly), most of the endorsement process is very much set up to privilege ordination as de facto endorsement, which makes getting certification as a layperson harder; even harder still makes trying to get endorsement as an openly gay, partnered Catholic. I am currently very much in the midst of navigating how I am going to go about seeking endorsement, as there are other routes for me to take if my bishop chooses not to endorse me. The Federation of Christian Ministries is an organization that folx have historically turned to for endorsement when they can’t get endorsement from their own institutions (for whatever reason, such as being a woman in a denomination that does not endorse women, queer in a denomination that does not endorse queer people, etc.). So, there are options for us lay queer Catholics to pursue ministry, even if, unfortunately, it means we have to do a lot more work than our cis-het peers.

As much work as all of this sounds, the biggest piece of advice I have to give you is this: just do it! I spent a lot of the first few months of my ministry terrified that the bishop was going to, I don’t know, find out that there was a lay ecclesial minister who was openly gay and partnered in his diocese, call the hospital, and... what? Get me fired? Tell me I couldn’t call myself Catholic anymore? Forbid me from taking patients Eucharist? Make my parish priest bar me from Mass?

The institutional and cultural homophobia in so many Catholic spaces can work into your psyche so deeply that it isn’t until you really stop an interrogate your own limitations that you realize that, actually, you can just do it. I applied to a Catholic divinity school with an ecclesiastical faculty and got in; I aced Canon Law; I spent two days writing and then orally defending my comprehensive synthesis exams; I wrote paper after paper on Christology, ecclesiology, Biblical studies, ethics, and Church histories... and no one stopped me. I ministered for a summer as a lay Catholic, and no one stopped me. I applied for a chaplain residency, got in, and spent a year ministering in the hospital as a lay Catholic, and no one stopped me. And I did all of this as an openly gay man.

The fact is, when I walk into a patient’s room, they rarely ask or even care what my sexual orientation is or what my religious identity is. They often ask something along the lines of “What church are you from,” but as chaplains we are trained to provide spiritual care to people of every spiritual tradition and people of no tradition at all. 

That being said, one of the most attractive things to me about hospital chaplaincy as a lay queer Catholic is that I do not work for the institutional Church. As I’ve said, being a professional board-certified chaplain requires seeking endorsement from one’s institutional church, and I certainly hope to receive such endorsement (even though I think it’s unlikely), but at the end of the day I am an employee of the hospital and skilled-nursing facility where I work, not an employee of the Church. Being a professional hospital chaplain is something that is open to everybody with the right training and qualifications, just like being a nurse, physician, or physical therapist. I know atheists and people who identify as spiritual-but-not-religious who are also professional chaplains. We are professionals with extensive training, education, and supervision, and while our personal religious and spiritual identifies are sometimes explicitly significant, the vast majority of the time they are not. 

Wow, that was a lot, but I hope I answered at least a few of your questions and gave you a few things to think about. I’ll be praying for you on your journey!

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