Priest is true to his faith, at odds with his church
So who is this Catholic priest from Fresno who stood up and spoke out against Proposition 8, putting his career on the line? As a gay man who finds the church's views on homosexuality so objectionable, why has he been a priest for more than 20 years and subjected himself to such moral conflict?
After reading my colleague Duke Helfand's story about Father Geoffrey Farrow and his recent career-suicide from the pulpit, I was curious.
Farrow agreed to meet me for lunch in the middle of a schedule that's gotten very busy since he became persona non grata to his employer. He's been asked to appear all over the state for rallies against Prop. 8, which would amend the California Constitution to say marriage can only be between a man and a woman.
Father Farrow, who was suspended by his bishop two weeks ago, strolled into the lobby of the Kyoto Grand Hotel in downtown Los Angeles wearing the collar.
"I'm still a priest," he said over lunch, though he fully expected to be disciplined for speaking to his congregation about Prop. 8 and wouldn't be surprised if he's ultimately fired.
For the moment, he's staying with friends in Los Angeles. Farrow, 50, doesn't know what he'll do after the election. He was suspended without pay and said his medical benefits run out at the end of the month.
Farrow, who lived in Cuba until the age of 4, grew up Catholic in Florida and knew as a teenager that he was gay. He dated girls "to keep up appearances" but was miserable about it, and he began questioning his faith.
"If God is omnipotent, why is there evil in the world?" he asked himself as body bags returned to the U.S. from Vietnam.
He looked into agnosticism and atheism, neither of which offered the answers he wanted. In his first year of college in Florida, he studied philosophy, read Cicero and mused on the meaning of history, civilization and the nature of God.
"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."
