NEW YORK — The Rev. John McNeill, 90, an openly gay Roman Catholic priest who, from the 1970s onward, publicly pressed the church to welcome gay men and lesbians — and who was expelled from his order as a result — died Sept. 22 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
His death was announced by DignityUSA, a group that supports gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Catholics. Rev. McNeill had helped found its New York chapter in 1972.
A Jesuit who was ordained in 1959, Rev. McNeill was known in the decades that followed as an author, activist and psychotherapist specializing in the needs of gay clients. He first came to wide, explosive attention in 1976 with the publication of his book “The Church and the Homosexual.”
That book was the first extended nonjudgmental work about gay Catholics, a subject that had long been taboo in official church discourse. It has been credited with helping to set in motion the reevaluation of the religious stance toward gay people, not only among Catholics but also among those of other faiths, that continues.
“John McNeill is one of the most important voices in the history of the LGBT civil rights movement,” Brendan Fay, the director of “Taking a Chance on God,” a 2011 documentary film about Rev. McNeill, said Friday. “‘The Church and the Homosexual’ became the primary text that is still considered the key in transforming the conversation on religion and homosexuality.”
For Rev. McNeill, the book, and his disclosure soon after its publication that he was gay, would lead to years of public opprobrium, censure by the church, exclusion from his order and, in the end, a newfound level of activism that sustained him to the end of his life.
“He was a gay man who was a Jesuit priest — and being a gay man who is a Jesuit priest, by the way, is not an unusual thing,” Mary E. Hunt, a Catholic feminist theologian and friend, said Friday. “The difference is that John McNeill was honest, and he was honest early. And being honest early meant that he paid a large price.”
“The Church and the Homosexual” drew on Rev. McNeill’s deep academic training in theology and, though only tacitly, on his own experience. In the book, he argued that a stable, loving same-sex relationship was just as moral, and just as godly, as a heterosexual one and should be acknowledged as such by church leaders.
After an extensive review of the manuscript by a panel of theologians, “The Church and the Homosexual” was published under the imprimatur of the Vatican.
Rev. McNeill described himself in interviews as a celibate gay man. It was a claim he made in public out of necessity: As it was, he was receiving stacks of hate mail, including death threats, from incensed strangers. In private, however, he was living with Charles Chiarelli, his lover since 1965.
John McNeill was born in Buffalo. When he was 4, his mother died; to rear him and his four older siblings, his mother’s sister married his father. In keeping with Old World tradition, they agreed to live celibately as brother and sister.
“We children grew up with the burden of our responsibility for our parents’ frustration and unhappiness,” Rev. McNeill wrote in his 1998 memoir, “Both Feet Firmly Planted in Midair: My Spiritual Journey.”
At 17, he enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the 87th Infantry. While serving in France, he was taken prisoner by the Nazis. Transported to a prisoner-of-war camp near Leukenwald, Germany, he was kept in a sealed boxcar for days without food or water. He licked frost from the boxcar nailheads until his tongue bled.
In 1959, he was ordained by Cardinal Francis Spellman, the archbishop of New York.