For Catholic priests, love plays a major professional role. They talk endlessly about the love of God, love for God, God’s love of man, love of neighbor, even love of self, albeit this last one at times disparagingly. The one that lights them up the most, however, is their love of the priesthood, something every priest I know feels deeply.

But the actual mechanics of love between two humans — the many powerful and often conflicted feeling that arise — create problems that are very challenging and deeply personal.

I am a psychologist, and I have spent much of the past three decades dealing with those kinds of problems. The kinds that compel priests’ superiors to send them off for treatment at a facility dedicated to priests. The sample with which I am familiar is biased — it only includes those priests whose behavior has been called into question, and it does not include those involved with minors.

I have dealt extensively with men who have been involved with other adults, both men and women. For the rest, I am sure there are many good men who have navigated the choppy waters of physical attraction with relative aplomb if not ease. In fact, I know some. I take them at their word.

In my first few months of counseling priests, I was shocked at the kinds of mayhem they could cause. I began to wonder why, if so many of them were so unhappy, they didn’t just leave. Over 30 years I learned that the answer is more complicated than it looks — especially when the source of unhappiness is love.

One of the virtues of being a therapist is witnessing human beings up close, or as close as intimate conversation allows. And up close to those priests labeled as “troubled” reveals a sad if complicated story.

Almost uniquely among human occupations, priests cannot marry, as a function of their vocation; nor can they engage in sexual acts, as proscribed by Catholic moral teaching. They live in a world unfamiliar to most of us, a world in which physical attractions and responses are not sought after and celebrated but instead are forbidden. Most people would not and do not volunteer to live in such a world, but men who would be priests do precisely that.

There are lots of reasons for this: a pious upbringing where priests are revered, or a desire to serve, to be special, to stand apart from others, to help humanity. Those are some of the satisfactory reasons. There are other, less benign ones, which a man contemplating the priesthood may not even himself consciously recognize at ordination.

People automatically accord priests a kind of deference available to few other professionals

What are those less benign reasons? Sometimes conflicts over sexual attraction or orientation, childlike shame over any sexual impulse, even limited ability to relate to people outside a structured role. And, paradoxically, a powerful desire for the esteem of others, for affirmation, and, yes, even for love. To be a priest is to be a leader esteemed and loved by Catholics everywhere. Naturally, he is the center of parish life.

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