"Jesuit priest suggests saints are ‘often’ gay"

"Father James Keenan, S.J., during the keynote address for this year’s annual Outreach Conference, blasphemously cited a 'queer theologian' to suggest that saints are “often” homosexual.

During his keynote address for the 2026 Outreach Conference at Georgetown University, the Jesuit cited the work of Flora Tang to claim that the saints are 'often themselves instructive as queer saints.'

Keenan, who has served as a theology professor at the nominally Catholic Boston College for over 20 years, also compared 'queer theologians' to civil rights activists and so-called 'Catholic feminists.'...

Flora Tang makes clear in... What Queer Theory Taught Me About the Saints... that the saints are often themselves instructive as queer saints,' Keenan said during his address. 'Yet she prompts us... to go beyond clinging onto narratives of queer certitude and move toward an openness to fragmented narratives that do not tidy up voices of mourning and unfulfilled hopes for a queer and decolonized church.'

Tang’s 2022 article for Political Theology Network blasphemously insinuates that several saints were homosexuals, including Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, fourth-century Roman soldiers who were martyred together for refusing to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods, and Sts. Perpetua and Felicity, third-century companion martyrs, each of whom had children...

Fr. Keenan, like his fellow Jesuit Fr. James Martin, the founder of Outreach, has a long history of explicitly contradicting the Church’s teaching on same-sex 'marriage.'

Unlike Martin, Keenan holds three theological degrees, including a Licentiate in Sacred Theology (S.T.L.) and a Doctorate in Sacred Theology (S.T.D.) from the Pontifical Gregorian University, and has worked as a theology professor for nearly 40 years at multiple nominally Catholic universities.

Most notably, back in 2003, Keenan testified against H.3190, a proposed constitutional amendment in Massachusetts that would have defined marriage as a stable union between a man and a woman, on the erroneous grounds that it was 'contrary to Catholic teaching on social justice.'

'As a priest and as a moral theologian, I cannot see how anyone could use the Roman Catholic tradition to support H. 3190,' the priest falsely claimed at the time."