Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (11 page)

But he was no mincing nancy. A burly, handsome satyr of a man, he sported a better-to-eat-you-with smile, a full head of close-clipped hair, and a goatee. Had he made an appearance in civilian clothes in Provincetown on Bear Weekend, he would not have been out of place.

Handy Gay Vocabulary Alert!

Q, What’s a bear?

A. A bear is a fat, furry homosexual. Bears do- not get as much TV time as the wispy queen, but they are nevertheless a very important piece of the homosexual menagerie. Bear Weekend is their annual gathering in the gay beach resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Subspecies include cubs, and, at the thinner end of the scale, otters and wolves. Bear faghags are known as Goldilocks.

Rules mattered to Father Bear-Daddy, and pity the eucharistic minister who crossed him. Bitch-slapping wasn’t out of the question. Take, for example, the rules about consumption of communion on the altar. (Did you even know such rules existed? It makes you think of how closely you flirt with perdition every day, doesn’t it?) Typically, as the presiding friar consecrates the bread and wine, the eucharistic ministers line up next to the altar. The friar distributes the consecrated host to each minister. Then both friar and ministers consume the host simultaneously.

Once when Father Bear-Daddy was presiding, a wayward eucharistic minister filling in for Mary Fleming accepted the Eucharist and immediately lifted the host to his mouth. Father Bear-Daddy whirled, his vestments lifting up around his hips like the skirt of a flamenco dancer. He slapped the offending hand. The host flew. The entire congregation gasped. Hand on hip like a steaming kettle, Father Bear-Daddy pointed sternly to where the host fell until the hangdog minister retrieved it. For a moment, I thought Father Bear-Daddy was going to take the host back and expel the offender from the sanctuary.

As a result of this transgression, Father Bear-Daddy convened all lay ministers for a refresher course. He charged around madly, emphasizing the need for rules and spelling them out for us with great emphasis.

“No
tongues”
he said. “When you’re up on the altar, you will take communion in hand — put one hand in the other and form a cup to receive the Lord.
Capisci?”

We all nodded dumbly to indicate, yes, we understood what he was saying.

A skeptical look passed over Father Bear-Daddy’s face. Then he exploded: “You should be smooth, simple, and dignified when you take communion. Those who make
quandamas
— that’s Italian, it means ‘a big show’ — those who make
quandamas
, they don’t understand.^ There shouldn’t be a bow or genuflection or fireworks. It’s communion, for goodness’ sake. It’s not time for you to show everyone else how pious you are, with sackcloth and ashes.”

For the briefest moment, I thought he was joking. I glanced at Mary Flanagan. Surely, this spelled the end of Ye Olde Piety Show.

Father Bear-Daddy hopped off the chancel — the raised platform at the front of the church — and wandered halfway down the pews like a talk show host among his studio audience. “These people who take communion on the tongue, they think they’re being
traditional!
 They think they’re being
more pious!
 It’s
ignorance
, that’s what it is! What’s traditional is the
hand
, creating a vessel for the Lord.”

Father Bear-Daddy loudly slapped one hand down on the other. The sound rang out like a shot in the deathly still sanctuary.

Father Abraham, who had been lurking in the wings, stepped forward. “What Father Bear-Daddy is saying is that you shouldn’t go out of your way to express any stray feelings of holiness you may experience just because you are on the altar. In many ways good ritual is good drama. The spotlight should be on what’s important. Therefore, there’s no need to genuflect or otherwise reverence the tabernacle on your way up to the ambo or when otherwise involved in the liturgy. Your involvement alone expresses the proper reverence for God.”

Mayhem ensued. Hands flew up. Voices rang out. Everyone and his sister had a different opinion about how the liturgy should be carried out. Half of the eucharistic ministers wanted to be assured they were doing no wrong. The other half, who could conceive no possibility of their own imperfection, were determined to help Father Bear-Daddy explain the rules. A nun who could barely speak English bitterly complained about the quality of lecturing she had experienced. A pinched woman with multiple lapel pins prescribed particular points of proper genuflection. They revisited rubrics long since rejected, offered suggestions for further improvement, and did everything short of adding a mariachi band to the music mass.

Mary Flanagan rolled her eyes. Father Bear-Daddy became visibly agitated. “Mary Flanagan, you’re not dead yet, are you?”

Mary wisely took a moment before she answered to be sure she had the correct response. “No, not yet.”

“Good. Then you can still learn how to do things a little differently.”

White-knuckled, eyes blazing, Father Bear-Daddy was not by nature a populist or a democrat. “You
all
can,” he said, pacing back and forth on the chancel and then up and down the center aisle. Taking a deep breath, he summoned benevolence and patience from what was clearly a depleted store. “The Church is not a people gathered to congratulate itself on its own righteousness. It is a communion gathered for mission.”

He returned to the safety of his cherished theme. He began railing about those who took communion on the tongue: “They bite, they snap, they scratch, they lick, they fling themselves to the floor.”

Lips curled in disgust, he acted out each of these forms of faux veneration. Then he glared into the pews as if we ministers were personally responsible for his close encounters with saliva. I, for one, felt not a little proud that I had been taking communion manually from the beginning. Father Bear-Daddy made it feel like a safe, morally unambiguous practice.

Mary Flanagan stood up in her pew, slipped into the aisle, and threw her arms around him. She laughed herself to tears and patted him on the back, thereby undermining all his precious dignity.

“I’ve been taking communion for eight decades, give or take a couple of years,” she said. “I guess I’ve never seen someone put so much thought into it as you do.”

The Rules

All this talk of rules and all these people presuming there was some contradiction between my gay life and my Catholic life got me thinking. What exactly were the Church’s rules regarding “persons with a homosexual tendency” (their lingo)? Most people believe that the Church isn’t a gay man’s best friend. But like a typical lawyer, I wanted the nuts and bolts, the unglossed, official line with all the nuances and loopholes. Sometimes we think we know something, but when we return to the original source, our knowledge can prove mistaken.

After all, when it comes to its most prominent leaders, the Church itself doesn’t throw away the spiritual baby with the homosexual bathwater. Francis Cardinal Spellman, bishop of Boston and later head of the Archdiocese of New York, for example, was notoriously gay. His particular fondness for Broadway musicals and their chorus boys earned him the nickname “Fanny Spellbound,” yet the Church named numerous high schools after him and offered him up as a model of virtue.

How bad could being a “drama teacher” be?

I consulted my trusty copy of the 1878 Baltimore Catechism.

The Baltimore Catechism

A widespread torture device used to destroy the knuckles of three whole generations. of American Catholic schoolkids while simultaneously eradicating all independent thought, the Baltimore Catechism is a primer. Its question-and-answer format gives standardized responses to questions of doctrine, morals, and all things Catholic. American students had to memorize the responses and regurgitate them word-for-word on demand,. beginning in kindergarten.

If you failed to recite the correct answer in the proper words?

“You got the ruler,” my father recalled ruefully sixty-five years after the fact, “which happened with an alarming degree’ of frequency in my case/*

Page 124 set forth the following teaching:

Q. Which are the Four Sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance?

A. 1. Willful murder; 2. Sodomy; 3. Oppression of the poor or of widows and orphans; 4. Defrauding laborers of their wages.

Q. Why are they said to cry out to Heaven for vengeance?

A. Because on account of their horrible wickedness they seem to cry out to Heaven for punishment.

Morally equating the insertion of bodily tab A into bodily slot B with “willful murder” struck me as a tad extreme. Most people — gay or otherwise — believe in a hierarchy of sin. It is worse to kill, for example, than to have consensual premarital sex with someone you love. Rape and child molestation aside, I imagined that the worst sins were not sexual acts.

Surely the Church had modernized since 1878. Notwithstanding its claim to “constant” teaching, the Church does introduce new ideas from time to time — like papal infallibility in 1870. Here’s the current catechism:

• Homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered, contrary to the natural law, and close the sexual act to the gift of life.
  

• They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity.
  

• Under no circumstances can they be approved.
  

• Homosexual persons are called to chastity.
  

Riffing further, under the leadership of B16, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (successor entity to the Inquisition) has stated that “The particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, [but] it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder…. It is only in the marital relationship that the use of the sexual faculty can be morally good. A person engaging in homosexual behavior therefore acts immorally.” Why is this behavior immoral? Because, according to said inquisitors, “To choose someone of the same sex for one’s sexual activity is to annul the rich symbolism and meaning, not to mention the goals, of the Creator’s sexual design.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) echoed this view: “Homosexual acts do not reflect the complementarity of man and woman that is an integral part of God’s design … and are not in keeping with our being created in God’s image and so degrade and undermine our authentic dignity as human beings.” Je-RU-salem! Bottom line? In the Church’s view, I’m a defective straight guy.

Even when making allowances for our human dignity, the Church can be cramped and ungenerous. For example, in 1992, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under B16’s leadership said, “What is at all costs to be avoided is the unfounded and demeaning assumption that the sexual behavior of homosexual persons is always and totally compulsive.”

Well, imagine my relief.

Searching for good news to hang my homo hat on, I found only these teachings:

• Homosexual persons must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.
  

• Full and active participation by persons with a homosexual tendency in the Church is encouraged, but the Church has a right to deny roles of service to those whose behavior violates her teaching.
  

The USCCB discouraged coming out to the general public. A coming-out party limited to “family members, a spiritual director, a confessor or members of a church support group” was permissible. The
Boston Globe
didn’t qualify as a church support group.

Seeking redemption, I turned to Rome’s teachings on porn, hoping it might rank low in the hierarchy of sin. No such luck. According to the Church, “pornography … perverts the conjugal act [and] does grave injury to the dignity of its participants … since each [participant] becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others…. It is a grave offense.”

Crap. I was worse off than I thought. Even my dignity was at risk. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Go straight to jail. By the Church’s rules, the best I could hope was that God looked down on me and nevertheless concluded:
Well, at least he’s not a willful ax murderer
.

Make me Believe That you Believe

After President Bush invaded Iraq, Father Bear-Daddy asked the other friars to insert a prayer for peace in the liturgy. One day, after the new prayer, an unshaven Irishman wearing glasses and a filthy cable-knit sweater ranted, “If you want peace, you need to get George Bush and his stinkin’ wife out of the White House. Then you’ll have peace.”

Acutely discomfited by the sound of his gutter voice in the Shrine, the rest of us prayed louder. It wasn’t so much his skepticism about the prayer that bothered us, but that he had disturbed our insular sense of peace.

The Shrine attracted a distinctly God-and-me-alone crowd. Even the offer of peace — when parishioners turn to one another and say “Peace be with you” and, in most churches, shake each others’ hands — was more solitary at Saint Anthony’s. Typically, my fellow communicants made do with a nod or a grunt. Occasionally, in a bout of enthusiastic bonhomie, someone might wave a limp hand.

When I was new to the Shrine and actually reached out my hand, the woman to whom I was offering peace blanched. She permitted only the slightest fingertip touch. The communicants sought a relationship with God, but not with each other. Who knew what sins lurked beneath the placid faces of praying men? Some people you like better if you don’t know too much about them.