Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (24 page)

The Church’s attitude toward the faithful is not only infantilizing, it’s downright dangerous. According to testimony by bishops in the court cases arising out of the pedophile priest scandal, one of the reasons for keeping the accused priests’ sins hidden was to avoid “scandalizing the faithful.” Ironic, no? What actually scandalized the faithful was the attempt to avoid scandalizing the faithful. Years after the scandal broke, Saint Anthony Shrine’s annual appeal contains bold language stating that all donated funds stay with the Shrine and do not go to the budget of the archdiocese. The friars implicitly recognize that the people’s faith in God and most priests is intact; it’s their faith in the Church’s leadership that has rightly faltered.

A Lovely Day for Excommunication

I had “grave sin” down pat. Scott and I were still engaging regularly in the sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance. Our debauched gay lifestyle went something like this:

1. Come home after work on Friday night.

2. Open bottle of wine.

3. Prepare butternut squash “boats,” candied beets, and pepper-rubbed steak topped with a fig reduction.

4. Endlessly bicker about whether the black leather sleeper sofa I purchased without permission is a complete abomination.

5. Agree that at least we can agree on the pew.

6. Set table and light candles.

7. Eat.

8. Watch the latest Netflix DVD.

9. Fall into bed exhausted at 10 P.M.

10. Engage in a little sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance.

11. Sleep.

Serving as Satan’s full-time handmaiden was out of the question. He would have fired my ass in a heartbeat. As Scott will attest, I can’t so much as boil an egg, fold laundry, or clean up after myself in the kitchen — let alone turn down the Evil One’s sheets.

Making my sin manifest was my weak point. Sure, I had come out to the Three Hale Marys, Tony Cinnabonini, and Fathers Francis, Myron, and Bear-Daddy. The chancery had received a deluge of my letters to Archbishop Sean and Reverend Kick-Me. The cameras caught me prancing around the Massachusetts State House during the rallies for gay marriage.

Yet no denunciations came my way. It was quite disappointing. My dreams of tightly wound parochial-school-trained albino monks sacrificing me on the altar and burying the corpse in the secret passageway between the friary and the nunnery of the Poor Sisters of St. Clare didn’t come true. Bringing to life my best fantasies of near-martyrdom — in which I snatched the assassin’s bullet out of the air midflight, held its metal jacket to my lips, and blew it cool while staring down my assailant — proved impossible.

In April 2004, the Archdiocese of Boston gave me a chance to correct the problem. Through its lobbying arm, the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, the chancery made available a video to play in place of a homily. (“We interrupt our regularly scheduled Mass to bring you this brief political announcement….”) This was the video that pitted senior citizens against gay couples and drove Jean Marchant toward ordination. An Associated Press story that appeared in the
Boston Globe
reported that the video “says civil unions ‘discriminate against the poor and needy’ and will hurt the economy by paying out Social Security survivor benefits.”

This article compelled me to dash off a letter to the
Globe
condemning the video for such silly and legally inaccurate propaganda. The consequences of this manifestness were immediate. Anonymous, irate Catholics left messages on my home answering machine accusing me of being a liar and a pervert. The inbox of our Romentics Web site brimmed with nasty messages (cc-ing the
Globe)
.

I began to look both ways for stalkers and nut jobs when exiting my condominium. The division between manifestness and martyrdom had narrowed. Where was my trusty parish rooster when I needed him? He would have pecked the bastards to death.

“Discernment” is the long, slow process of deciding what God wants you to do. Overused in the Catholic Church, it has gotten to the point where bishops have to discern whether to take their morning bowel movement. See also “inertia” and “excuse to do nothing slowly.”

XI

Living on the Liturgical Edge

To really understand the good Samaritan story today, you must replace the good Samaritan with the good Muslim. The good queer. The outsider, when all the establishment people walked on by
.

— Andrew Sullivan

The Good Queer

HE COBBLED SQUARE
at Boston’s Old State House was full of clean, hot young products of the parochial school system who had probably never masturbated in their entire lives. They accosted passing strangers and bribed them with offers of free pizza. A priest descending the stairs with the grace of a prom queen shook my hand and bade me welcome. An elderly nun in a blue habit guarded the sign-in sheet. She looked poised to critique my penmanship with a wooden ruler.

“E-mail, too!” she demanded shrilly. It wasn’t optional. Beyond the nun stood a spare friar dressed in the usual brown robe with knotted cord. A silver cross hung from his neck to his waist, and he wore a square gold ring on the third finger of his right hand.
(Mixing gold and silver? Naughty)
Before my brain could register what I was looking at, a small, energetic bald man in a suit and too-thin tie seized my hand and shook it warmly.

“Welcome. Have some pizza,” he said. “His Eminence is about to begin.”

The other men in the audience wore pocket squares and tie pins in an old-school Irish lace-curtain way you would never mistake for gay. Elegant colonial seafaring paintings hung on the walls. At regular intervals, the subway passing beneath the State House caused the room to shake. At the sight of the wide pine floorboards, the real estate agent in me began assessing an asking price.

Archbishop Sean took his place at the podium not eight feet from my front-row seat. He was wearing unfashionable square glasses. His hair and beard had mostly gone white, but a little gray remained in his neatly trimmed mustache. The hood of his brown robe revealed a quilted lining that I found touching.

O’Malley’s voice was deep but gentle, without a hint of frivolity. Gray, maybe — gay, no. He kicked off with a well-worn story. Before becoming archbishop of Boston, Sean had visited a church on Martha’s Vineyard. The church had stained glass windows that read, each word on a successive panel: Go —- and — sin — no — more. But because it was summer, the pastor had opened one window to catch the sea breeze, changing the admonition to read: Go — and — sin — more.

The assembled crowd guffawed and made clear that, whatever sins they might have committed, failure to appreciate the archbishop’s sense of humor was not one of them.

“We are not at church to be entertained,” Sean said. “Mass-going makes sense when we know how to pray.” He extolled silence for its many gifts of grace and told us that the gift of the Spirit was bestowed in the context of a worshipping community.

“Many people see Catholicism as the Church of No,” Sean said. “No this, no that. But it is a Church of Yes. Yes to God, yes to life, yes to the beatitudes. Religion is not intended to be used to manipulate people but to humanize them.”

But that’s how you use religion in politics, Sean
—
to manipulate, nay, intimidate. Isn't that what excommunication is all about?
I monitored his speech and mannerisms obsessively, trying to mine useful clues.
There must be more
, I thought.
There must be a code, secret signals I’m not seeing, Sean is no soaring demagogue. He’s not a natural charmer
. The weird intensity of my feelings made me think that if I wrote him another letter, a marshal with a restraining order would show up at my door.

Sean continued, “The
authentic
practice of Catholicism humanizes people.”

Murmurs of assent rose from the crowd at this backhanded reference to an
inauthentic
practice of Catholicism. Sean and his audience clearly had divided the sheep from the goats. A gay, irreverent porn writer? They might as well have given me cloven hooves and tattooed 666 on the back of my head.

“We must accept the call to discipleship,” Sean said. “We must not only love our neighbor, but also the stranger and our enemy.” The weight Sean placed on the word
enemy
made clear that he was referring to all of us inauthentic Catholics.

At the end of Sean’s speech, I raised the question that started me on this book. “Archbishop Sean, what should a Catholic do with the anger that develops at those whose views are diametrically opposed but whose good faith must be credited in an era where fury is the medium of discourse, political and cultural?”

Sean flashed me a look full of patience and experience and then said, “If we’re always expressing anger, then well never change hearts.”

Before I could follow up, someone else asked, “How do we answer lapsed Catholics who have switched to another faith where they say they are more comfortable?”

Sean answered, “The more we discern the riches of our faith, the more able we are to respond. People who dismiss the Church often make the mistake of failing to look at its doctrines globally in relation to each other. To take the teaching in an isolated way does violence to it.

Introspection and guilt blocked out the rest of the Q& A. If I had come to express anger and get excommunicated, how could I hope to change hearts? Was I just taking the Church’s teachings in an isolated way?

Archbishop Sean took a position at the top of the stairs as we filed out. It was the perfect opportunity for the leper’s kiss. My mind struggled to find the right words. In my head, the confrontation took this form: “Archbishop Sean, I’m a proud gay Catholic in a long-term, monogamous, spirit-filled relationship. The anger about which I questioned you is the anger I feel toward you. You make me angry. Do you have any advice for how I should deal with that anger, you bastard?”

Even as I put my question together, that phrase, “long-term monogamous relationship,” rankled. As if my complaint would be less legitimate if I were a big whore.
All are welcome
, I reminded myself.
It wouldn’t be any different if I were Ward and June’s fun-loving son
.

This internal debate, coupled with a childish reluctance to profane a priest, hijacked my gay voice. My speech came out like this: “Please-tomeetyoummmm.” The line moved on. Before I knew what had happened, I was out in the street, and the archbishop was behind me.

What happened? Excommunication appealed to my instinct for martyrdom. It was a chance at another minute of fame, as interest in gay romance novels cooled. It also sounded cooler than philately or making religious dolls.

The cause was familiar from conversations with priests: I feared getting tossed out. I feared becoming a stranger. I feared losing the experience of the Spirit. I feared losing Father Myron, the Three Hale Marys, the G-L Spirituality Group, Ye Olde Piety Show, and the skeptical little old ladies showering me with praise. What I really sought from Sean was excommunication lite. Excommunication with a seat belt and training wheels. Not the real thing.