Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (13 page)

“I’m not going to quiz you about your archbishop,” he said. “I don’t want to encourage your craziness.”

“QUIZ ME!”

“Can’t we just commit the sin that cries out to heaven?”

“No.”

Scott sighed. “OK,” he said. “What’s his favorite color?”

“Brown, of course! He’s a Franciscan. Ask me something else.”

“Favorite movie?”

“Diabolique
. He’s not all about angels.”

“When was he born?”

“June 29, 1944. Too easy. Ask me something hard.”

“How many altar boys has he diddled?” “Very funny. Zero — as far as I know.”

“Does he have any idea that you exist?”

I was stumped. “I’m not sure,” I said. “Does it matter? This is going to be like
Roger and Me
. I just want to get in his face and give him a kiss.”

“Michael Moore wanted to kiss Roger Smith?”

“Stay with me, Scott.”

“Lemme get this straight —”

“So to speak.”

“You want to kiss the cardinal?”

“Metaphorically speaking.”

“Why?”

“Why not? We all could use a little love.”

“I thought you wanted to confront the bastard.”

“I do — with love.”

“I see. Well, wear a condom, wouldja?”

“A condom?”

“Metaphorically speaking. I don’t want you bringing any metaphorical infections home.”

What I Learned about Archbishop Sean on My Summer Vacation

These are the highlights of my Brown Bag dossier:

The Good

• No recorded views on Harry Potter’s satanic nature. In fact, Sean admitted to having read
  The Da Vinci Code
  and joked publicly about Mary Magdalene being portrayed as Mrs. Jesus Christ.
  

• Emphasis on the lost art of homiletics. Sean instructed his priests that they should stress creativity, humor, and — thank God — brevity.
  

• Passed police background check prior to his appointment. (Call me old-fashioned, but ideally my bishop has no criminal record.)
  

• Lifework heretofore focused on missions to immigrants and the poor. Sean opened an AIDS hospice in the Virgin Islands and had known Mother Teresa personally.
  

• Had a screen name. Upon his ordination in 1965, the Brown Bag changed his moniker from Patrick to Sean.
  

• Demonstrated ability to change his mind. In 2000, he re-fused to condone Irish Catholics’ eating corned beef with their cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day because the feast fell on a Friday during Lent. After protests and national media coverage, he revised the decree.
  

The Bad

• On May 18, 1999, O’Malley testified in a legislative hearing in Massachusetts that gay parents could “open the door to polygamy and incest.”
  

• According to a priest who met with O’Malley: “He doesn’t talk. It’s the big dilemma for most priests. He’s like a sphinx…. He just sits there.”
  

• According to another priest, “He’s a ‘company man.’ He’s cautious and likes to limit conversations to noncontroversial issues.”
  

• Archbishop Sean likened prochoice candidates for political office to “the KKK without the sheets.”
  

• The motto on his coat of arms is
  Quodcumque dixerit facite
  (Do whatever he tells you) — not the slogan of a man likely to buck the Vatican.
  

• He was born near Cleveland.
  

The Ugly

• According to a priest and mental health professional: “O’Malley has an illness, a mental illness. If he’s in a room of people, he just stands there with his arms crossed. Doesn’t say a word. If you ask him how he’s doing, he says fine. If you say you’re bleeding arterially, he just nods. The guy is in over his head.”
  

• In 2000, then-bishop Sean invited the chief judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court to speak at a dinner. A few days before the event, O’Malley rescinded the invitation. He told her that he would not feel comfortable sitting at the same table, because she had spoken out in favor of gay civil rights. He offered to reinstate the invitation if she publicly distanced herself from her remarks. Rather than admit to O’Malley’s disinvitation, the event’s organizers disingenuously announced that “circumstances beyond her control” had kept the judge from speaking.
  

Love Letters to the Archbishop

To confront the archbishop, I hit him where it counted. I mustered all my courage and wrote him a nasty note. I imagined all the auxiliary bishops cowering behind their desks at the chancery as they absorbed my withering prose.
Careful^
they’d whisper to one another,
or hell write another one I

Here’s my letter:

Dear Archbishop Sean:

I write to you with the idea of reconciliation. I am one of your flock. I am a lector and a practicing Catholic. I am also a gay man in a long-term monogamous and committed sexual relationship with the man I love. Your behavior toward gay members of your flock — in word and in deed — does not reflect the love that I take from the Gospel.

Let me assure you that I hoped for the best from you. The announcement of your appointment came on my birthday. My richest experiences have been with Franciscans, so your Capuchin background was itself a reassurance. Your knowledge of languages suggested an ability to speak across boundaries that seemed absolutely necessary for a fractured Boston. Your history among less privileged flocks was an inspiration — it suggested you would spend far more time on the sins of the world then on the sins of the flesh.

Sadly, you have disappointed. You have chosen to exercise not merely moral authority, but
political
authority: I cannot understand how you justify involving yourself with necessarily ephemeral and transitory political movements. It demeans your spiritual authority. You should get out of the business of appearing with political figures like Mitt Romney and encouraging that political petitions be presented and signed at and after Mass. You demean the office and the sanctuary.

Can you truly believe a child is worse off with a lesbian mother than none at all? Can you possibly believe that a civil marriage demeans a Catholic religious marriage any more than, say, Britney Spears’s “marriage” did?

The best solution would be for us to witness together. My hope is that by witnessing together, it will become evident that we share far more than those things that divide us. Therefore, I’d like to ask your permission to serve as lector at one of your Sunday Masses at the Cathedral. Please let me know if you will permit this and let me know what dates may suit you.

Several days later, a thick envelope with red lettering appeared in my mailbox. The return address was the chancery. A Reverend Kickham had signed it.
Kick-him
, I thought.
The cardinal’s playing a big joke on me
.

Bracing myself for brimstone, I perused Reverend Kick-Me’s response. It was … sickeningly inoffensive. At first blush, the good reverend provided me with nothing to rage against. I felt like I had been talked down from a ledge, and now the nice men in white coats were going to take me to a clean, padded room.

Reverend Kick-Me soundly rejected my request to serve as a lector during a Mass over which O’Malley presided. According to him, Archbishop Sean rarely said Mass at the cathedral in our gayborhood, except for special events for which the hosting organization chose its own lectors.

As for my complaint about the archbishop’s condemnation of gay marriage, Reverend Kick-Me wrote, “The Archbishop acknowledges that some of the Church’s teachings are a source of concern to some people. Please know that the Archbishop does not seek to cause any person upset or distress.”

I wrote back that it wasn’t necessarily the Church’s teachings that caused immediate concern; the vigorous attempt to have those teachings inscribed in the civil law, on the other hand, did trouble me. While I appreciated his politeness, to say the archbishop didn’t seek to cause upset or distress was disingenuous. This guy testified that gay parenthood might lead to polygamy and incest. This guy wrote that the institution of same-sex marriage merely reflected “an exaggerated emphasis on the preferences and conveniences of individuals” and that the Supreme Court decision mandating marriage equality was a “national tragedy.” This guy endorsed the statement that “no same-sex union can realize the unique and full potential which the marital relationship expresses,” and said that recognizing same-sex civil marriage “risks diminishing our humanity.”

“Forgive me for being overly sensitive, Reverend,” I wrote. “I guess my feelings are easily hurt. But the Archbishop’s proclamations demean our worth and cheapen our love, so by their nature they cause upset and distress. To perform an act while knowing its natural consequence means the actor (Sean) must have also intended the consequence. I don’t mean to advise you on public relations, but wouldn’t it be better (and more honest) just to admit to seeking the consequence of our upset and distress, but claim instead that Sean believed that in the long run the bitter medicine would be good for us?”

Reverend Kick-Me wrote back that Sean would be glad to greet me personally at Christmas Mass if I wished.

The South End Catechism

Q. Why seek a kiss from the Brown Bag?

A. Catholics are genetically programmed to seek blessings. Blessings justify what we’re doing anyway and give our projects a boost. It stems from a fundamental lack of self-confidence.

Q. Have you spoken to God?

A. God has never given me the time of day. But then again,, I wouldn’t have presumed that, if 1 heard a voice, it was God’s. I like to imagine God is busier than that, concerning himself with war and famine and grace and matters more important than me. I fool around with men, I don’t rob banks.

Q, Don’t you want to know what He has to say?

A. Of course. But Pat Robertson makes a living speaking to God, as if he were a celestial psychotherapist giving God fifty-minute hours on the heavenly divan. Pat isn’t shy about letting us know what the Almighty has to say.

Q. Doesn’t scripture condemn homosexual activity as an abomination ?
 

A. Yes. And Leviticus also condemns the consumption of shellfish.

Last week, Archbishop Sean launched a campaign to eradicate lobster rolls.

Q. Any other Old Testament surprises?

A. Well, if you get picky and take the Old Testament literally, even Jesus gets condemned: Deuteronomy says, “Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree.”

Q. What else is the Bible good for?

A. It makes a nice doorstop.

Q. Answer the question, Counselor
.

A. Here’s a better answer: southerners invoked scripture to justify slavery, pointing out that neither Paul nor Moses had ever objected. Jefferson Davis wrote, “[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God… It is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation.” Indeed, if you read closely, the Bible not only sanctions slavery but also provides that, so long as you only incapacitate your slaves for a couple of days but don’t kill them, you can beat them mercilessly (Exodus 21:20—21). By contrast, abolitionists had only a couple of flimsy passages in Galatians and Philemon on their side.

Q. Generally specifying, aren’t priests good people?

A. The word
cleric
derives from the Greek word
fyeros
, which means a casting of lots or a roll of the dice.

Q. Are there other groups the Church used to hate hut now loves?

A. Oh, yes. Gentiles, for example. The Jews regarded them as unclean and their practices as evil. Yet outreach to Gentiles is a central theme of the New Testament, Don’t even get me started on how the Church treated the “perfidious Jews.” only to change its mind after the Holocaust.

Q. What’s the next book you and Scott are writing together?

A.
The Harry Potter Code
, The Vatican will have it banned and us exorcised. We say, bring it on, Father Amorth. We’ll only incapacitate you for a couple of days.

Advanced Thinking

As a public school Catholic, I endured a decade of Continuing Catholic Development, which was also known as “Sunday school,” though in my town it took place on Wednesday afternoons. (Mine wasn’t the first deal with God, apparently.) Parochial school students were, of course, exempt from CCD, as much from their natural virtue as from the expectation that their continuing Catholicism was being adequately developed.

Our CCD teachers were mainly laypeople, with the occasional substitute nun to keep us on our toes. In fifth grade, a teacher posed this moral conundrum to my class: given a collapsed building in which some victims are gravely hurt and likely to die but easily reached, while others are not gravely injured but difficult to reach and will die from lack of oxygen if not soon rescued, how would you go about rescuing people?