Daniel A. Helminiak (born November 20, 1942 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a Catholic priest, theologian and author in the United States. He is most widely known for his international best-seller What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality.
He was a professor in the Department of Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology at the University of West Georgia, near Atlanta. There from 1995 to 1997 and 2000 until early 2018, he regularly taught Human Sexuality, Statistics for the Social Sciences, Foundations of Neuroscience, and Animal Mind. On the graduate level he has taught courses related to the psychology of spirituality, which is his specialization and the focus of his research, lecturing, and writing.
Early life and education
Helminiak was born (1942) and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a Polish Catholic community on the South Side. He frequently refers to this experience in his popular writings on spirituality and community. He attended parochial grade and high schools and at age seventeen entered seminary to study for the priesthood at Our Lady of the Lake Seminary, Syracuse, IN, and St. Vincent Seminary, Latrobe, PA, where he was awarded a BA in philosophy (1964). He completed graduate studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, earning an STB (1966) and an STL (1968), Bachelor and License in Sacred Theology, and was ordained there at the pope's parish church, St. John Lateran Basilica (1967).
He served as Associate Pastor of SS. Simon and Jude Church in Scott Township (Pittsburgh) for four years and subsequently pursued an educational ministry, serving as junior faculty-member at St. Mary Seminary, Baltimore, MD (1972-1973), completing a PhD in systematic theology in the Joint Doctoral Program of Boston College and Andover Newton Theological School (1979), serving as Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Spirituality at Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio (1981-1985), completing an MA in personality theory at Boston University (1983) with a thesis that became Part I of his book Spiritual Development, and earning a second PhD in Human Development at The University of Texas at Austin (1994). On weekends throughout these years, Helminiak ministered in local parishes in Baltimore, Boston, San Antonio, and Austin and, having come out as gay in 1976, also served in those areas and nationally as chaplain to DignityUSA, an LGBT Catholic support network.
Career and work
In 1995, Helminiak accepted a teaching position at the University of West Georgia (then, West Georgia College), where he has remained except for advanced training in counseling at Pittsburgh Pastoral Institute. Helminiak was elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, was certified as a Fellow of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, and is licensed as a Professional Counselor (LPC) in the state of Georgia. Also in 1995, Helminiak submitted to the Vatican a formal resignation from active ministry although he remains a priest according to Catholic teaching: "Once a priest, always a priest." As is not uncommon, the Vatican never responded to his resignation, which fact he takes jokingly to mean that the Vatican is allowing him to continue to speak for the Catholic Church.
From 1975 to 1978 at Boston College, Helminiak served as teaching assistant to Prof. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ (1904-1984), the philosopher, theologian, economist, and methodologist whom Newsweek styled the Thomas Aquinas of the twentieth century. Lonergan is reputed to have integrated classical philosophy with contemporary science and, in the process, to have resolved the Kantian problem of knowing the "thing in itself." Building on the thought of giants of the Western Tradition—such as Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Newman, Einstein, Hilbert, Gödel, Heisenberg—Lonergan portrays the human mind as a self-transcending, normatively structured, self-correcting dynamism geared to the universe of "being," all that there is to be known and loved. He refers to this dimension of the mind as intentional consciousness and frequently also as the human spirit.