The Role I Played

On Performance, Promises, and Coming Home to Myself

I used to watch a show called The Americans, about two Soviet spies living undercover in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. during the Cold War. On the surface, they were the perfect American couple: two kids, a normal job, cookouts with the neighbors on the Fourth of July. But underneath, they were something else entirely.

The brilliance of the show was that, over time, the lines blurred between their cover life and their secret identity. They were really married. They really loved their kids. They really lived in that house. But they also kept secrets. And somewhere along the way, you stopped knowing which part of their life was the act, and which part was real.

For a long time, I lived like that. Not as a spy, but as someone who learned to survive by inhabiting a role so thoroughly that it became second nature. I wasn’t hiding from the CIA, or even the CDF. I was hiding from myself. And I got so good at it, I forgot there was anyone behind the mask.

Recently, I was talking with another ex-priest about this phenomenon, this performance we habituated ourselves into, day after day, year after year. He told me he never really fooled himself. Not completely. He always felt the dissonance, always knew—however dimly—that he was playing a role. “There was always a part of me,” he said, “watching the whole thing from backstage.”

For me, it was different. It didn’t take me long at all to convince myself that the role I was playing was the reality. It wasn’t a mask I could take off at the end of the day, but a version of myself I believed I was obligated to become. And the parts of me that didn’t fit, I treated to cut off, ignore, repress, deny.

I became, in a way, my own double agent: outwardly devout, inwardly fragmented, and constantly gaslighting myself to justify the contradictions. It wasn’t even dishonesty, not in any conscious sense, at least. It was survival.

I believed the part because I had to. Because not believing it would have meant confronting the terrifying possibility that I was not, in fact, who I had worked so hard to be. That the story I had built my life around—the story of holiness as self-denial, salvation through suppression—might not, in fact, be true.

Formed for Performance

Looking back, I can see that I was primed for this kind of performance long before I ever set foot in a seminary.

When I was a child, I learned how to disappear in order to keep the peace. I was always sensitive, perceptive, and eager to please. My parents were wonderful and loving, but they each had their own emotional fragility: patterns of reactivity, volatility, and unhealed pain that they didn’t always know how to manage. The more I encountered their unpredictable moods, the way their fights sometimes tipped into violence or my uninhibited self could trigger an unexpected storm, the more I learned how to read the room before stepping into it.

I stopped showing up as my full self, whether at school, with other kids, or even at home. Instead, I offered only the parts of myself that I sensed would be safe. Be helpful. Be polite. Don’t ask for too much. Don’t cry. I became a master of intuition, reading people’s expectations and shaping myself to meet them. I learned that love was something you earned by becoming what other people wanted you to be.

That instinct followed me into adolescence. Around the time of my conversion, I began to experience same-sex attraction, and I buried that part of myself as deeply as I could. After all, I had just found what felt like home in the Church, a spiritual sanctuary and a place in the family of God. I was even beginning to wonder if I might have a calling to the priesthood. And as I had learned all my life, if some part of me didn’t seem like it would be welcome, then I would simply cut it off, starve it, silence it. Pretend it had never been there at all.

By the time I entered seminary formation, the art of performance had become second nature. I could read a room in an instant, sense what was expected of me, and slip into that shape without hesitation. I could disappear into the mold of holiness presented to me like I was born for it.

The Church didn’t have to work hard to teach me how to suppress my own desires, mistrust my emotions, or hide the shameful parts of myself from the world. It just sanctified my own instincts and gave them new, nobler names: virtue, obedience, sacrifice.

No wonder I was always the golden boy in seminary. One evaluation put it this way: “Matthew excels in his etiquette, courtesy, and social skills. Many seminarians look up to him as a model for how they wish to be as a cleric who is truly a man for others.”

And I was. I became exactly what they wanted me to be. I poured myself into that image with everything I had. I was so good at being a man for others, no one ever thought to ask if I was still a man for myself.

The Cracks Began to Show

Of course, the problem with performing holiness is that eventually, you run out of energy to keep the act going. The performance only works as long as you can sustain it—and priesthood doesn’t make that easy.

I poured myself into ministry when I arrived at my first parish. I was determined to be the spitting image of a “good and holy” priest: always available, reliable, compassionate, generous. The kind of priest people could count on.

I said yes to everything I could. I kept my calendar ridiculously full. My appointments were often booked two months out. I worked on my days off, returned messages late at night, and never said no to a hospital call, even when I was already running on fumes. And I was praised for it. I was admired and affirmed by my parishioners, thanked over and over for showing up when no one else would.

But little by little, I could feel something fraying inside me. I was exhausted all the time. I started to feel disconnected in prayer and vaguely resentful of the people I was trying so hard to serve. I could feel my heart growing brittle. I flinched when I caught myself snapping at someone in the confessional or making an unkind remark about a parishioner behind her back. I was running up against the limits of my capacity to perform.

And then, of course, there were the nights I would come home after a full day of ministry and sit alone in my apartment, tears pricking at the corners of my eyes, staring at the wall with a kind of blank sadness I didn’t know how to name.

I told myself this was all just part of the cost of discipleship. After all, Jesus doesn’t promise us an easy life! I heard the voice of one old priest echoing in my head: “The heavier your cross is, the more you know you’re following the Lord.” I just needed to dig deeper, pray harder, try harder.

But beneath the language of spiritual bypassing I’d been taught, a quieter truth was starting to rise. I wasn’t just tired. My performance was crumbling. The version of myself I’d played to perfection was hollowing out. I simply didn’t have the energy to keep up the façade.

And in that hollow space inside me, something unexpected was beginning to stir.

Coming Home to Myself

It didn’t happen all at once. It came in small, ordinary moments. One afternoon, I was sitting in a coffee shop across from a young man who had become a friend. We were talking about something unremarkable—coffee, parish politics—but in the midst of our laughter, I felt a soft, familiar ache in my chest. It wasn’t lust or temptation. It was a tender, quiet yearning for something like… love.

For a moment, the old reflex kicked in. That instinct to shut it down, to push the feeling into some inner closet and lock it away. But I didn’t. Not this time. I let it rise. I let it settle in my heart. I didn’t spiritualize it or push it away. I just… felt it.

Another night, I stumbled across Heartstopper on Netflix, and for the first time in my life I found myself watching queer love unfold, not through the lens of sin or temptation, but with curiosity and a growing sense of wonder. I saw something tender, awkward, innocent, as these two boys fumbled their way through their first love.

I began to grieve, not just for what I had never had, but for what I had never even let myself want. I cried for the teenager in me who never got to hold hands in the hallway, who never got to giggle on the phone late at night with his friends about a boy or write his name in the corner of a notebook. Who never got to say out loud, “I like him.” Who learned instead to call that part of himself “disordered” and tried to kill it before it had a chance to breathe.

And then, sometime later, when the ground I had built my life upon was already shifting beneath my feet, I met him. My boyfriend, before he was my boyfriend. We talked about theology, about the shared sadness of being gay Catholics in a Church that denies you exist and the strange loneliness of being seen as “holy” when you’re secretly falling apart.

One day, I asked him to pray for me. And he told me, “I pray for one simple petition: that you’re happy. Not some crappy ethereal, esoteric happiness. Happiness in the flesh.”

That blessing undid something in me. I think part of me had been waiting years to hear those words.

When he and I finally met in person for the first time, there was a moment when he held me in his arms, and I felt my whole body relax. After years of holding myself in check, I could finally let go. There was no shame. No script. No spiritualizing away our desires or the pleasure of being together. There was just presence, and touch, and the astonishing grace of being known—and loved—not for the mask, but for the self beneath it.

For the first time I could remember, I didn’t feel like I was performing.

I felt like I was coming home.

What About the Promises?

So what does all of this mean for the promises I made?

It’s a question I wrestled with often in the months before leaving ministry, as I began to look honestly at the life I had built and the parts of myself I had buried to sustain it.

I made seven promises on the day of my ordination. At the time, I believed I meant them. I wanted to mean them. And yet now, with the clarity that only comes in hindsight, I can say this: I don’t believe those promises were morally binding. Not because I was lying. Not because I was insincere. But because I wasn’t free.

Let me explain. In the Church’s own moral tradition, a promise or vow requires more than reciting the prescribed formula. It’s not a magic spell. For a promise to be binding, it must be made freely, deliberately, with full knowledge and consent.¹ Since it’s a form of self-giving, a promise must proceed from a conscience that is truly free, a self that is whole.²

And the truth is, I wasn’t whole. I was playing a role, a carefully constructed image of the good and holy man I thought I was supposed to be. I had spent so many years suppressing, censoring, compartmentalizing myself that, by the time I stood before the bishop to make my promises, I had lost touch with the true self who was meant to make them.

As I was working through all this months ago, I came up with a case study for myself (because I’m a hopeless theology nerd). Consider, if you will, the story of Maria.

As a young woman, Maria survived abuse and became deeply dissociated from herself as a result. She spent years in spiritual direction, where she was told that she couldn’t possibly have a vocation to marriage because of the past trauma she had experienced. Any personal desire she might have for marriage or a family, she was taught, was sinful and selfish, because it was not the will of God for her. In fact, her salvation would be at stake if she gave in to those temptations.

Maria chose to enter religious life. Eventually, she even made solemn vows. But years later, after significant healing and therapy, Sister Maria realized she had never been free to choose otherwise. Her apparent “yes” had been shaped by fear, by manipulation, and by a distorted understanding of God and of herself. It wasn’t an authentic gift of self. It was an act of spiritual survival.

Would Sister Maria need to be formally dispensed from her vows? Canonically, yes. Religious vows, once accepted by the Church, carry legal effects and must be dispensed by the competent authority.³ Morally, however, it’s more complicated. A dispensation might be necessary to release her from her legal obligations and clarify her status in the Church, but not to free her from the moral obligations which, in fact, never existed. A promise that was not made in freedom cannot bind the conscience.

I see myself in a situation analogous to Maria’s. My priestly promises were accepted by the Church and carried juridical effects: faculties, assignments, canonical status. Having left ministry, I have no doubt that the Church will now pursue the appropriate canonical process, including a dispensation from the obligations tied to the clerical state.⁴ But morally, and theologically, the heart of the matter lies elsewhere. Like Maria, I now recognize that the promises I made were not the fruit of freedom, but of fear. I was not offering my whole self. I was offering a role, a mask, a performance I had mistaken for my identity, saying “yes” to a form of life I believed was my only shot at salvation.

I believe God receives such promises with compassion and tenderness, honoring both the spirit in which they were offered and the truth of what we were able to give at the time. I believe He saw my sincerity, my longing and striving, and also the fear, the pressure, the false self I had to construct in order to survive. After all, He searches the deep things of the heart, and nothing is hidden from his eyes (cf. 1 Cor 2:10; Heb 4:13).⁵

And in the end, I don’t believe God will hold us to the promises made when we were performing. He desires, not the performance, but the person. He doesn’t catch us out on legal technicalities. He invites us to grow into the fullness of who we’re made to be.

Freedom and the Gift of Self

Before I was ordained, I had a rich theological vision of the priesthood and the promises I would make. I wrote profound things about sharing in the nuptial love of Christ and the Church, offering the sacrificium laudis through the Liturgy of the Hours and Holy Mass, giving myself over to the gradual, lifelong conformation of my life to the example of Christ.

I didn’t see the promises I was then preparing to make as mere legal obligations. For me, they were a form of loving self-gift. And in some sense, they still are. I may no longer feel bound by them, but I also don’t reject them. I look back at them now as a glimpse of something I was trying to give, in the only language I had at the time. I wanted to love well. I wanted to pray deeply. I wanted to give my life away in service.

What I couldn’t yet see is that those promises were never meant to be enacted by someone split in two. The priest is meant to offer his whole self to God and to the Church, but I had never been given permission to bring my whole self forward. I tried to live those promises by severing and suppressing parts of myself: my body, my longing, my vulnerability, my need. But love, real love, is never offered by halves.

This brings us to the present day. A friend asked me recently what my experience of priesthood has been like since leaving active ministry. After all, according to Catholic theology, priesthood is not just a job; it’s something you are. Truth be told, I’m still learning how to answer that question. But the beginning of an answer might be this:

Priesthood, for me, has always been about self-gift. Offering myself in union with Christ, out of love for God and neighbor, “on behalf of all and for all.”⁶

The more I dare to walk into the truth of who I am, the more I find my self-gift becoming something real, concrete, whole-hearted, and free. I’m not living behind a mask anymore. I’m not offering a role, a projected ideal, a version of myself trimmed down to fit the mold. I’m offering myself—this body, this life, this love I carry—for the good of others. And because I feel more fully myself than I ever have, I believe I’m free now to offer a more perfect gift of self than I ever could before.

I may not be following the letter of those priestly promises I made, but I’m still trying to live out their spirit. I still pray. I still strive to live with chastity and integrity, not out of fear or the obligation of celibacy, out of reverence for the sacredness of my own body and the bodies of others. I still want to conform my life to Christ, not by suppressing who I am, but by offering myself, “through Him, with Him, and in Him, to the glory of God the Father.”⁷ The form of my life may have changed, but the call to self-giving love still moves my heart.

And here’s the mystery I’m just beginning to glimpse. By leaving the priesthood, I think I’m finally starting to live it. Not in terms of the external role, but the deeper reality that those promises I made were always meant to point toward. A life given in love. A heart poured out in truth. The quiet, daily offering of myself—my real self, as I actually am—to the One who searches the deep things of the heart.

Conclusion

Some nights, I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, remembering the weight of the role I used to play. I see the disapproving faces of people who formed me, people who only ever knew the version of me I was performing, scandalized now by the true self coming into the light. I think of all the times I knelt down in the dark and begged God to make me good enough to stay.

And then I think about the first time I told someone the truth. Just said it, plainly, tremblingly, out loud.

“I’m gay.”

“I’m exhausted.”

“I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.”

There was no bolt of lightning. No rupture or rejection. Just quiet acceptance, a smile, a hug.

But in that silence, something shifted. As if hearing the code-word that wakes a sleeper agent from his long and patient exile, a part of myself that had spent too many years undercover began to stir.

At last, the agent is coming in from the cold. The war is over. He’s no longer playing the role they trained him for. He’s just a man now: tired, honest, learning how to live again in his own skin. Learning, for the first time, what it means to be free.

1. See Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), §§1734–1735; Code of Canon Law, Latin–English Edition: New English Translation (Washington, DC: Canon Law Society of America, 2012), can. 1191 §1.

2. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 88, a. 2, ad 3. Aquinas holds that a vow, as an act of the virtue of religion, must be made with full deliberation and proceed from a free will. If a person is not interiorly free, e.g. due to fear, compulsion, or error, the vow lacks the necessary integrity to bind morally.

3. CIC, can. 692; can. 707 §1.

4. CIC, cann. 290-293.

5. New American Bible, Revised Edition (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011).

6. Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, anaphora prayer.

7. The Roman Missal, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), Eucharistic Prayer (Doxology).