Robert Carter (priest)

Robert Earl Carter (July 27, 1927 – February 22, 2010) was an American Roman Catholic priest and LGBT rights activist.

Early life

Carter was born in Chicago, Illinois on July 27, 1927, the son of Earl and Ila Grace Smith Carter. His father managed several music stores. The Carters were Protestants who worshiped in different traditions. Carter grew up in Lakewood, Ohio, and later Park Ridge, Illinois.^[1]

Career

Carter graduated from the University of Chicago in June 1946 and the next day was received into the Catholic Church as a convert. Three years later, he completed a master's degree in Greek studies at his alma mater, and in 1953 he received his doctorate there. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1954 and was subsequently ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1963.^[2]

Carter was gay, and became one of the first Roman Catholic priests in the United States to acknowledge this publicly after he became one of the founders of the National Gay Task Force in 1973 (later the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force). He saw no contradiction between homosexuality and Christianity, and in a later unpublished memoir wrote: "Since Jesus had table fellowship with social outcasts and sinners, those rejected by the religious establishment of his time, I consider myself to have been most fully a Jesuit, a ‘companion of Jesus,’ when I came out publicly as a gay man, one of the social rejects of my time. It was only by our coming out that society’s negative stereotypes would be overcome and we would gain social acceptance."

He was subsequently visited by a subprovincial of the Jesuit order. Although there were calls for his expulsion, he was not disciplined.

Earlier, in 1972, he had helped to found the New York chapter of DignityUSA, a support group for gay Catholics. Hosting the first meeting of the chapter at the Jesuit chapel on West 98th Street in Manhattan. When the Catholic authorities said Dignity could not meet on church property, Carter celebrated Mass in apartments all around Manhattan. He led blessing ceremonies for gay couples. He testified in support of the gay rights law proposed by Mayor Edward Koch before it was passed by the City Council in 1986. He urged Dignity to march in gay pride parades and marched himself, in his clerical collar.

He trained as a social worker at Columbia University in 1981 and went on to counsel gay priests and hundreds of lay Catholics. By 1985 he was counseling AIDS patients at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, and he later became a supervisor of the outpatient AIDS program at the Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan.^[3]

Death

Carter died on February 22, 2010, at his residence at Fordham University in The Bronx, New York City, New York.^[4]

Notes