Losing My Religion (22 page)

The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.

—
MARK TWAIN,
A TRAMP ABROAD

 

I
WAS NOW
a godless journalist on the religion beat. The problem that loomed before me wasn’t lack of objectivity—I knew I could still produce fair and balanced stories—but burnout. Like a homicide detective, I had seen too much. A cop friend of mine says his job is hard because he is always dealing with the worst people or people at their worst. That was me on the religion beat. And because I had developed a reputation for a certain kind of story, I kept getting great tips about unsavory people within religion. Some of the best stories never made print: the semi-famous pastor under investigation for hiring a hit man to kill his former gay lover, or the nationally known conservative preacher who took a wide variety of illegal drugs deep into each night and was a serial adulterer. Sometimes prosecutors never filed charges. Other times I couldn’t get additional sources to back up the story.

My body of work nevertheless continued to improve, earning me national awards each year. But I had developed a cynicism I didn’t like. I tried to focus on more positive stories about faith, but even that didn’t help. I had lost the reporting mojo that made the religion beat—even at its darkest—a journalistic rush. Since I now believed that God hadn’t called me to this job, I no longer felt bound to stay on the beat. The end was near.

It came in the summer of 2005, in a courtroom in Multnomah County, Oregon. Just as there is a large network of clergy sexual abuse survivors, there are also several national support groups for women whose children were conceived by Catholic priests. Most of the priests have spurned their children. Their superiors generally offer little support—morally or financially—for these kids. One of my sources had called me with a tip, and that’s how I ended up in the Portland courtroom. I was reporting on a story about an unemployed mother who had been impregnated by a seminary student 13 years earlier. She had gone to court trying to get increased child support for her sickly 12-year-old son.

Father Arturo Uribe, 47, took the witness stand. The priest had never seen nor talked with his son. He even had trouble properly pronouncing the boy’s name. On the stand, Uribe looked relaxed. He wore a white button-down shirt, gray slacks, blue blazer with a small gold cross on the lapel and an easy smile. In a thick Spanish accent, Uribe confidently offered the court a simple reason as to why he couldn’t pay more than $323 a month in child support for his ailing 12-year-old son. He simply had neither money nor income.

“The only thing I own are my clothes,” he told a Portland judge.

His defense—orchestrated by a razor-sharp attorney paid for by Uribe’s religious order—boiled down to this: I’m a Roman Catholic priest, I’ve taken a vow of poverty and child-support laws can’t touch me.

The boy’s mother, Stephanie, couldn’t afford a lawyer. Unemployed, she lived rent-free in the basement of a friend’s home in a run-down section of Portland. The dank housing exacerbated their son’s chronic asthma and allergies, which had been kept under control by 28 prescriptions over the past year. She had joined a food donation program so she and her boy would have enough to eat.

Uribe’s “having success, moving up the ladder, and we’re just stuck here, struggling,” Stephanie told me before the hearing. “My situation is not ambiguous. I’ve got DNA walking around that proves he and [his religion order] have responsibility. They are so morally corrupt.”

In court, Stephanie was flummoxed by the legal proceedings, stumbling badly as she acted as her own attorney. Many times, the judge helped her along. On legal points that didn’t matter, even Uribe’s attorney helped. But on any argument of consequence, the opposing lawyer shut her down mercilessly with rapid-fire objections. It went on, painfully, for three hours. The judge ruled almost apologetically in favor of Uribe, who was serving as the pastor of a large parish in Whittier, California. The fact was, the priest had no income or significant possessions. It didn’t matter that his order had plenty of resources; it wasn’t the boy’s father. There was nothing the law could do.

“It didn’t look that great,” Stephanie said afterward, wiping tears from her eyes. “It didn’t sound that great…but at least I stood up for myself.”

It wasn’t the first time Stephanie had been savaged by the Catholic Church. A dozen years earlier she had filed suit against the Archdiocese of Portland, hoping to get child support for her son. Then-Archbishop of Portland William Joseph Levada, now a cardinal in the Vatican and close advisor to Pope Benedict XVI, argued in a motion that the “birth of the plaintiff’s child and the resultant expenses…are the result of the plaintiff’s own negligence,” specifically because she engaged in “unprotected intercourse.” The church’s attorney later told me that he was using every available legal argument to be an advocate for his client. Legal documents filed on behalf of Levada, one of the top Catholic leaders in the world, argued that Stephanie was negligent because she had
not
used birth control—even though birth control is a mortal sin in Catholicism.

At first, Uribe’s religious order agreed to pay Stephanie $215 a month, a sum that was raised by $108 a few years later. But as her son’s medical and other expenses grew, neither Uribe nor his order would pay more. Uribe summed up his position in a statement he sent to me before my story was published, which had a distinctly lawyerly, not a fatherly, tone to it:

The leadership of the order agreed to assume my obligations for child support. The order has continued to do so and has provided or offered more support than I have been [legally] obligated to pay…. I will continue keeping my son and his mom in my prayers.

 

Stephanie said that Uribe had never attempted to contact his son—even after the boy sent him an album filled with photographs of himself and tried to interview him for an elementary school journalism project after the death of Pope John Paul II. Stephanie’s son sat by the phone each afternoon for days, waiting for the call from his dad that would never come.

“It is unclear to me just who Arturo is praying to on our behalf,” she said. “Certainly the God of my faith has no tolerance for a father shunning his own child.”

During Stephanie’s latest courtroom battle, the only spectators, besides myself, were her sister and brother-in-law. When the hearing was adjourned, I stood outside the courtroom doors, waiting to get a comment from the priest or his attorney. As the triumphant pair walked out, smiles on their faces, I introduced myself as a reporter with the
Los Angeles Times
and started to ask Uribe a question.

“He has no comment!” the startled attorney said. “No comment!”

“Do you want to comment, Father?” I asked.

“No comment,” she said for him.

The two stalked off and disappeared into an elevator, angry that a reporter from Los Angeles had crashed the hearing. A few minutes later, the elevator doors opened again and out they came. The attorney marched back into the courtroom and tried to get the judge to put the public hearing under seal, a request he denied.

If it weren’t so sad, it would have been funny. I could see why the Catholic Church would try to cover up the case. When my story ran, even the most faithful parishioners were shocked at how callously the church dealt with a priest’s illegitimate son who needed money for food and medicine. (The embarrassed order voluntarily provided Stephanie with an adequate settlement after the story was published.) They were equally shocked that Cardinal Levada would have his name attached to a legal argument that claimed a woman had been negligent because she had
not
used birth control.

My problem was, it no longer shocked me. For years, I had seen worse from priests, bishops and cardinals caught up in the church’s sex abuse scandal. Even before Father Uribe’s hearing began, I knew how it would play out.

As I walked into the long twilight of a Portland summer evening, I felt used up and numb. I wanted to be angry, but I was too depressed to muster the emotion. From a park bench, I called my wife on a cell phone and told her I was putting in for a new job at the paper.

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him.

—
H. L. MENCKEN,
MINORITY REPORT

 

I
WAITED MORE
than a year to come out of the closet and tell people I no longer believed in God. I needed to let the ringing in my ears subside from the pounding I took on the religion beat and allow my new feelings about faith to solidify. I also wanted time for my emotions to settle down. I had left the religion beat—and my faith—with a lot of anger, and I didn’t want to come across as a spurned lover wanting to exact revenge on religion.

It wasn’t hard to keep my lost faith a secret because I hadn’t talked openly about my religion, except to close friends. As I began to confess to them what had happened to me, the typical reaction was shock. My loss of faith had taken me years to recognize and then grow used to, but they had to absorb the revelation in a single conversation. One day I ran into Christopher Goffard, a journalist who had been just hired by
The Times
. I’d worked with him some years earlier and was always a huge admirer of his work and his character. We had kept in touch over the years and had talked religion on several occasions. During our newsroom reunion, he off-handedly asked me something about my faith.

“Oh,” I said, a sheepish smile on my face, “I don’t believe in God anymore.”

“What?” he said, as if he’d heard me wrong.

“I don’t believe in God anymore, Chris.”

“But you were so religious. What happened?”

“I lost my faith on the religion beat.”

Christopher responded like any good reporter would have: “That’s got to be a great story. Let’s go have lunch soon and talk about it.”

A few days later, over a plate of chicken tacos, rice and beans, I told him my story as best I could. As I fumbled through it, I realized I hadn’t dissected exactly how I had arrived at this place. The reasons for my disbelief were all tangled up in a mess of confused feelings and blur of stories. I had always been a strong believer in Socrates’s warning that “a life unexamined is not worth living,” so I vowed to myself then to figure out a way to better understand my fall from faith.

Fortunately for me, the newspaper provided an opportunity for me to retrace my spiritual journey and publish my findings.
The Times
had recently started producing first-person pieces of journalism that instantly became some of the paper’s best reads. One reporter wrote about discovering she had an extraordinarily high risk for cancer and how it affected her decision to marry, to quickly have children and to undergo a life-changing surgery. Another journalist described his quest to track the source of the salmonella poisoning that had left him hospitalized. A foreign correspondent wrote about the professional and personal dilemmas he faced in Somalia because of a death threat he received shortly after two of his colleagues had been murdered. Each of those accounts was gripping. I wasn’t sure whether my story would stack up against them. I knew the stories I reported on were interesting; I had no idea whether my own journey would be. But I decided to float the idea anyway.

I e-mailed the editor who approved these pieces. There were many good editors working at
The Times
, but Roger Smith stood apart. He looked like a distinguished attorney with his close-cropped white beard, neatly combed hair and conservative and tasteful (especially by newsroom standards) wardrobe of suits and slacks and sport jackets. He had an unflappable demeanor and a fairness and kindness that had endeared him to reporters usually not known for their charity toward editors. He also had an eye for a great story and a gift for elevating an average piece into an excellent one. It was always an honor to work with Roger. His stories ran under the front-page banner of “Column One,” where, in theory, the paper’s best read ran each day.

Roger e-mailed me back and said he loved the premise for the piece, but that I had to be prepared to reveal myself in ways that could be painful. We journalists, by habit, are not good at revealing ourselves. We are voyeurs who live through others. We step momentarily into the lives of people, scribble down what we see and then write about it in the third person. This was one of journalism’s most attractive benefits. Each day, I had a free backstage pass to a different world. Among hundreds of experiences, I have interviewed the president of the United States; stood on the infield grass at Angel Stadium and flinched at the crack of the bat as the Los Angeles Angels took batting practice; and tagged along with a paparazzo, hunting celebrities in Beverly Hills, among many other adventures.

“Report the news, don’t make it” was drilled into us from the beginning of our careers. Occasionally, when we can’t avoid it, we refer awkwardly to ourselves in the third person, as in “the mayor handed
a visitor
in his office a gavel and said….” Like actors who don’t break the fourth wall with the audience, we don’t break the wall that puts us in the story. But now I wasn’t just part of the story, I
was
the story. I had to keep shooing away doubts—why volunteer for this? The backlash might be vicious: I would be seen as a spiritual wimp, or a traitor to Christianity. Maybe even a tool of the devil. I’d be ridiculed. I’d be told I’m going to hell. Even Jesus said the only unforgivable sin is speaking out against Him.

I wondered why exactly I wanted to write this up in the first place. Yes, I wanted to understand my own journey, but I could do that by writing in a private journal. The journalist part of me wanted to do it because I thought it might be a good story. But there were other motivations. I sensed that there were other people wrestling with doubts about God and religion, but who felt alone and forced to stay in the shadows as I had done. I remembered my relief while watching Julia Sweeney’s
Letting Go of God
. Maybe my story could help others, too.

The darkest part of my heart wanted to show, in a very public way, how people who identified themselves as Christians had driven me away from a faith I loved. If someone with my desire for God could come away disillusioned by faith, then Christianity in its present form was in trouble, and someone should point that out to believers. I felt a little like the kid who declared that the emperor had no clothes, though I had no illusion that my revelation would open the eyes of others. It would be enough just to speak up for myself.

I printed out hundreds of stories I had written in my eight years on the religion beat and dove back into them. I flipped through old notes I took from some of the larger stories. I stared at the photographs that appeared with my articles. I sketched out a timeline containing key moments in my journey. I talked with old friends and associates to get their recollections. I was researching a eulogy, and it felt incredibly sad—and surreal. Part of me still couldn’t believe this had happened, especially as I relived the early joys of the religion beat, now knowing the sorrow of how the story ended. At times, I viewed my old self with disgust and disdain—at my naïveté, my blind faith, my seemingly endless attempts to hold onto my beliefs and the amount of time, measured in years, it took to admit my religion was lost. I didn’t like the portrait it painted of me, and I was tempted to touch it up so I would look better.

Believe it or not, right then, I found a new savior: Howard Stern, the radio personality. Howard is often criticized for being crude and sophomoric, among other things, but his critics overlook why millions of people love him: Howard Stern is utterly honest about himself on the air. Few people are candid about their lives, even in private; Howard tells listeners his most embarrassing secrets and darkest thoughts each day. His show is often a stream of consciousness straight from his id. It takes only a little listening to Howard to learn that his father’s constant criticism of him as a child fuels his desire to succeed and still haunts him each day; that he hates the diminutive size of his penis, the largeness of his nose and the gangliness of his body; that going to a psychiatrist up to four days a week hasn’t cured his narcissism but has made him a better father; that he loves lesbian stories and the sounds of farting; and that his relationship with his model girlfriend is growing a little stale because he finds himself wanting to play chess on the computer at night instead of going to bed with her.

If you listen to Howard for a few weeks, the chances are you are going to like him—sometimes in spite of yourself. When someone is so honest about his life, his failings, his fears and his prejudices, there is something very appealing about the openness. It’s what makes testimonies in church—or at AA meetings—inspirational, touching and emphatic. As people pour out their hearts during a bout of honesty—sometimes revealing horrendous behavior—they always become more human, sympathetic and lovable. Everyone has messed up and is screwed up; it’s the people being honest about it who gain our admiration. But it is a tough discipline to transfer outside the safety of a church sanctuary, an AA meeting hall or a psychiatrist’s office.

As I started to write, Howard Stern was my role model. He was far more honest than the average Catholic bishop. I found myself going back and rewriting passages several times, trying to be more honest and penetrate my feelings more deeply with each pass, Howardizing them. I had to omit a few parts of my story because the people involved were unwilling to allow our private conversations into print. That aside, I tried not to flinch in the writing. By the time I was done, I had a 6,000-word essay. Roger Smith wielded his keyboard like a surgeon’s knife and rather painlessly cut it down to a more newspaper-manageable 3,800 words. The piece was ready to go.

The worst part of a journalist’s job is waiting for a story to be published. There is a terrible gap between the time a story is edited and when it is published. It feels as if you are approaching an uncharted waterfall and have reached the point of no return. My obsessive-compulsive instincts always kick in during these gaps, and at home (or at a restaurant or in a movie theater lobby), with a printout of the story in hand, I continue to recheck facts and torture myself over each sentence, wanting the nuance and flow to be just right. If I catch something before 10:30 p.m., I call the copy desk and beg them to make a last-minute change. After that, the paper is put to bed, though even that fact doesn’t stop me from continuing to go over the story.

On the eve of publishing this story, I felt as though I were heading toward Niagara Falls in a tiny kayak. My intestines cramped. Ask reporters on the religion beat and they’ll tell you the most vicious e-mails they ever receive as journalists are from people of faith who feel their beliefs have been slighted. The passion behind religion magnifies any perceived mistakes, slights or bias. My ears began to ring, anticipating how my inner thoughts and feelings and failings would be taken by readers who hold their faith sacred. With the echo effect of the Internet, there was no telling the repercussions. In our bedroom, I relayed this to Greer, just before she turned off the light at 11 p.m.

“There’s no use worrying about it anymore,” she said cheerfully. “There’s nothing you can do to stop it now.”

Thanks, dear. That was exactly my problem. It was too late, and I was sure that the whole thing was a stupid idea—and I had volunteered to write it! How stupid could I be?

Whenever I got myself in big trouble, my mind flashed back to the eighth grade. My best friend, Jon Schleimer, was spending the night, and I proposed a daring game: see who could come closer to the fuse of an M-80 with a lighted match. I even volunteered to go first. I struck the match and held it perilously close to a fuse that was attached to the equivalent of a quarter stick of dynamite. Suddenly I heard “Hsssssssssssssssssss”—the sickening sound of the fuse alit. My stomach sank, and my world went into slow motion. I pinched my fingers together on the unburned portion of the fuse, hoping to extinguish it. The fuse burned right through my fingers. Now I had only seconds left. The M-80 was about at my eye level, sitting on a windowsill in my bedroom. It was ten o’clock at night, and my parents were asleep in the next bedroom. I grabbed the M-80 to throw it into the corner of the room, thinking very clearly: How dumb could I be?

It exploded in my hand. In shock, with my ears ringing, I opened my hand and counted the fingers. Miraculously, they were all there, the explosion muffled by my closed fist. Smoke rose from my palm. Much of the skin on my hand had been blown away. As the pain arrived, I started to scream over and over and over again, “I’m so stupid! I’m so stupid! I’m so stupid!”

This is roughly how I felt now, waiting for my story to be published. I attempted to go to bed, but I couldn’t get close to sleep. At midnight, I got up and decided to check
The Times
website. The page came up instantly at that late hour, and boom, there it was—the most prominent story on the page, along with a photo of me. The headline, which I saw for the first time, read “Religion beat became a test of faith: A reporter’s work covering church sex scandals, religious tycoons and healers tests his beliefs—and triggers a revelation.” Oddly, seeing it there on the web calmed me down. I had gone over the falls. No more anticipation. The story was out there, for better or worse. I read it from start to finish, though I had gone over it a hundred times before. Reading my stories on the web or in the paper always gave me some psychological distance. Sometimes, it made me sick to my stomach about the lameness of the writing or the holes in the reporting; other times, I was pleasantly surprised. With this piece, I was actually proud—a rare feeling for someone neurotically critical of his own work. I hated only the photo.

With adrenaline pumping through me, I had some time to kill before I’d be able to sleep. I absent-mindedly checked my work e-mail. It was 12:15 a.m., about an hour after the story had been posted on the web. Most of my stories generated no more than a dozen e-mail responses, often split down the middle between those offering praise and criticism. On routine stories, I might get only a stray e-mail or two. On larger stories—such as the Alaska Native story—I might get several hundred.