Obituary: John McNeill – Jesuit who fought for respect for gay people in church

John McNeill, who has died aged 90, was a Catholic priest who publicly pressed the church to welcome gay people and who was expelled from his order as a result.

Ordained a Jesuit in 1959, McNeill was known as an author, activist and psychotherapist specialising in the needs of gay clients.

He first came to wide attention in 1976 with the publication of his book The Church and the Homosexual.

For McNeill, the book, and his disclosure soon after its publication that he was himself 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 longtime friend of McNeill’s, said last week. “The difference is that John McNeill was honest, and he was honest early. And being honest early meant that he paid a large price.”

John McNeill was born in Buffalo, New York. At 17, he enlisted in the army and while serving in France was taken prisoner by the Germans. After the war, he graduated from Canisius College in Buffalo and was ordained in 1959.

Though the church had approved his book on homosexuality, it later reneged on this. In 1977, the Vatican ordered him not to speak or write on the subject.

He obeyed the order for nearly a decade, while continuing pastoral work with gay men and lesbians. But when a 1986 pastoral letter, co-authored by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, declared that homosexuality was "a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil", McNeill condemned it.

In 1987, on the Vatican’s orders, he was expelled from the Jesuits but became more visible than ever as an activist. John McNeill is survived by his long-term partner, Charles Chiarelli, whom he married in Toronto in 2008.