Applicant says Jesuits rejected him after he criticized Father James Martin

Peter Swindal, who spent a year discerning a vocation with the Society of Jesus, said the Jesuits have turned him away from the novitiate. He wrote on X on October 15, 2026 that the decision followed an admissions interview in which he told the interviewer he disagreed with Father James Martin's advocacy on LGBT issues. Swindal said the order not only rejected his candidacy but told him he needed to "seek psychological counseling" to address the views he had expressed.

Swindal said he submitted a formal application to enter the Society of Jesus in 2025, after a year of vocational support from the order. The selection process included a nine-hour interview. Near the end, about eight hours in, the interviewer asked whether he had a problem with anything in the Church. Swindal said he answered that he thought the handling of the case of Father Marko Rupnik had been poor and that he did not share Father Martin's positions. "That is genuinely all it was. It lasted about ten minutes," he wrote in a thread of replies the same day.

Swindal's article on Martin

Before applying, Swindal published an article on Substack in July under the title "The Anti-Jesuit," arguing that Martin inverts the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises to promote LGBT ideology. He wrote that Martin's efforts do not serve to evangelize people who experience same-sex attraction but instead push the Church toward accepting positions condemned by Church doctrine.

In the same article, Swindal argued that Martin keeps a mental reservation, holding an unorthodox reading of Catholic statements that appear orthodox. "Father Martin is always careful to affirm that the Church's teaching is 'clear,' but not that he assents to it," Swindal wrote, describing what he considers a strategy of gradual acceptance of doctrines at odds with magisterial teaching.

Martin's past statements

Martin is a Jesuit priest in the United States known for his ministry to LGBT Catholics. He has called the Church's teaching that homosexuality is disordered "cruel" and has suggested that Catholic doctrine on homosexuality is not "authoritative." He has also questioned the biblical condemnation of sodomy and has said that homosexuality is "the way God made" people. He has said he hopes that one day husbands in same-sex marriages will feel comfortable kissing each other during the sign of peace at Mass.

In the past year and a half, Martin compared schoolchildren reading books that promote same-sex marriage to Jesus telling parables. He compared the parenting of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is married to a man, to the Holy Trinity, and he celebrated a confirmation Mass for ABC News correspondent Gio Benitez, who is also married to a man.

Church teaching

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered" and "contrary to the natural law," and states that homosexual activity can never be approved. The same text says that "homosexual persons are called to chastity" and describes the homosexual inclination as "objectively disordered."