Bodies Clothed in Faith

Scientific and Media Evidence on the Sexuality of Catholic Priests

Abstract

This article, grounded in the works of Michel Foucault, Paul Preciado, and Judith Butler, analyzes scientific evidence regarding the sexuality of Catholic priests and the main media portrayals that frame this experience, seeking to understand its social, theological, and subjective implications in the contemporary context. Methodologically, a systematic narrative scoping study and a critical-discursive analysis of national and international reports were conducted. A total of 24 academic studies (2011-2025) were reviewed, selected according to the following inclusion criteria: original and empirical scientific works, available in full, resulting from field research focused on sexuality and Catholic theology. Studies dealing exclusively with child sexual abuse committed by priests were excluded, as well as opinion pieces, editorials, and abstracts without full-text access. The results show that the Catholic Church operates discursive strategies for regulating clerical sexuality, producing both silences and resistances where desire emerges as a field of dispute. Sexuality, understood as a performance traversed by institutional norms, manifests itself through its fissures and media exposures, especially when narratives about clerical intimacy come to light. Celibacy, instituted as a political technology, does not suppress desire but reinscribes it within regimes of guilt and surveillance, generating psychic, moral, and media effects. Thus, clerical homosexuality, far from constituting a deviation, reveals the incompleteness of the pastoral apparatus and the uncontrollable nature of sexuality as a social and discursive production.