But, you see, that is why it is all so ambivalent and morally equivocal in me even now, that seminary life, thinking about it on the far side of 50, with 60 in sight, a father to teenage boys, a husband for 23 years to the same, good, decent, Catholic woman.
One Catholic archbishop, Daniel Sheehan, who has since died, told me: "It could well be that a person with this kind of a hidden psychosexual problem could escape to the seminary and the like, thinking in some way that this would be a way of sublimating this problem".
Mr. Lewis was studying at a Baptist seminary in Nashville, but was thinking about trying to integrate his hometown college, Troy State, now Troy University.
As the city celebrates New York Is Book Country this weekend on Fifth Avenue, I cannot help thinking of the seminary library at Broadway and 122nd Street, where the vitality of books and the precariousness of books are simultaneously on view, a double message inscribed on every page.
"But if a young man were to walk in and say, 'I'm thinking about going to seminary and entering the priesthood,' you can be sure a couple of family members would pull him aside and say, 'Are you sure you know what you're doing?' ".
The pope's comments might lead to a slackening in efforts to chase gays out of the seminary, but it doesn't look like Pope Francis was thinking about this when he spoke.
"There are four women training at Wycliffe" — a conservative evangelical seminary in Oxford — "and when they read, from I Timothy, 'Women should not be priests,' what are those women thinking?" There are only two women at St. Stephen's House, the city's conservative Anglo-Catholic seminary.
Most folks who are interested in keeping a lively discussion on spiritual values going in our increasingly secularized culture will welcome this film with open arms, glad that someone finally made something that has enough commercial potential to get ordinary folks thinking about issues normally reserved for late-night dorm discussions in conservative seminaries.
A sensible leadership would be thinking of careful steps to make the transition -- trial ministries, changes in the seminaries, theological reflection on the meaning of the axial shift (instead of ineffectual bans on addressing it).
Over lunch recently at Merkato 55, an African restaurant in New York, he was relaxed and thoughtful, already thinking ahead to his imminent return to Africa and to his main job these days, teaching at a seminary in Zimbabwe.
