Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (25 page)

After work, I stopped by St. Anthony’s and sat in the back pew. Relief and exhaustion washed over me. My eyelids drooped. The combined odor of incense, sweat, candle wax, cedar, wet feet, and floor polish filled my nose. Restless sighs escaped the faithful. Perhaps a tear rolled down the cheek of the plaster virgin. It was so easy to believe in a great big miracle, so easy to say, “Lord, I am not worthy. Only say the word, and I shall be healed,”

That night, at home, I engaged in an act of self-love that makes masturbation and YouTubing look like works of charity. I Googled myself. An obscure site informed me that my surname derives from the
Latin ponte fractus
, which means “broken bridge.” In contrast, the word
pontiff,
 commonly used for the pope, derives from the Latin 
pontifex
, “bridge builder.”

Myriad interpretations suggested themselves, but the one that kept coming to mind was that my quest would not only fail to build bridges — through baldness and otherwise — but doom the few not yet burned.

Tuesday with Anthony

Tuesday at the Shrine meant retrieving three-inch-thick brass discs about twice the circumference of a hockey puck from the back room of the sacristy. Each puck functioned as an oversize locket, containing a chunk of the body of Saint Anthony of Padua himself. After each Tuesday mass, the eucharistic ministers stood on the chancel with a purificator in one hand and a brass puck in the other. One by one, the parishioners approached and bowed their heads.

Why Tuesday? Why not Wednesday? Or Thursday? Or the second Saturday in June? Because Saint Anthony’s friends brought his body to the friary at Padua for burial on a Tuesday. Those who prayed for Anthony’s intercession on that day reaped miracles, rewards, and other spiritual bonus points. Ever since, the devoted have tuned in on Tuesdays, hoping lightning will strike twice.

A shortage of ministers forced me to serve as a relic holder on one Tuesday. A line formed in front of me. I smiled inanely, wanting to greet the parishioners, congratulate them, or perhaps perform some liturgical dance. Some parishioners kissed the holy puck. Others bussed cheeks as if greeting a socialite. Some only touched the puck with their fingertips. Before the next parishioner approached, I wiped the puck “clean” with my purificator.

Mary Flanagan approached the puck, closed her eyes, and looked beatific. As she pursed her lips, a voice spoke loud and clear, as if from on high:

This is idolatry
.

The voice belonged neither to God nor Mary. It was Gram’s. I was channeling Gram. Had Gram a chance to observe all this puck-kissing, she’d have had a field day. A hundred Catholics grubbing after a lock of hair of unproven provenance would have engendered in her a fit of high-Protestant protestation and renewed visions of tunneling priests.

No one in my family ever went out of his or her way to lock lips with a bone fragment. No doubt parochial school kids better understood the practice, but it smacked of voodoo — as if Saint Anthony’s DNA had the power to transmit magical vibes, but only if you came within inches. Call it the germ theory of spiritual contagion.

My Baltimore Catechism gave the following explanation:

Q. Why do we honor the relics of the Saints?

A. Because their bodies were temples of the Holy Ghost and will one day rise from the dead to eternal glory.

Well, of course — body temples. That clears the whole thing up.

Wouldn’t the modern Church prefer to hide relic worship away and pretend it doesn’t exist — like a crazy spinster aunt, a flamboyantly homosexual archbishop, or, for that matter, a pedophile priest?

Father Daniel Hennessey, vocations director of the Boston archdiocese, explained that reverence for relics dates to the early centuries of Christianity. In the days of Roman persecution, many Christians were killed because they refused to renounce their faith. According to Father Hennessey, “Christians would gather around the mortal remains [of the early martyrs] in order to remember the love by which these martyrs witnessed to Christ and to be strong in their own faith and courage in the face of possible martyrdom for themselves.”

After the Romans stopped persecuting Christians, believers transferred the remains of martyrs to sites where churches were to be built. In fact, for hundreds of years, the Vatican actually required that every church house a relic under its altar, along with a certificate of authenticity from Rome. No relic, no certificate — no Mass, no way. The altars of eighteen European churches house the foreskin of Jesus, known as the Holy Prepuce, which has the power to make sterile women fertile. I am not making this up. Christ must have been terrifically popular on the biblical version of ManHunt.net if his manhood was sufficiently large to supply eighteen separate sites with skin.

The rules regarding altar relics changed after Vatican II. Nowadays, with O’Malley closing and consolidating churches, the archives of the archdiocese overflow with used relics from over 170 saints: bone fragments, scraps of cloth, and fabric soaked in a saint’s blood.

But these were the B-list relics. Even in the twenty-first century, certain relics outrank others, and the archdiocese was playing host to a particularly famous specimen, the kind of relic that had its own paparazzi: the sacred heart of Saint John Vianney, curé of Ars.

Stealing the Sacred Heart

Saint John Vianney, a diocesan priest in France, had a great talent for reading the hearts of penitents. Surviving on only a few hours of sleep and some boiled potatoes, he regularly spent fourteen to eighteen hours a day in the confessional. Tens of thousands of Catholics, including bishops and aristocracy, sought spiritual counsel from him. To accommodate the worshippers, France built a special railroad link from Lyon to Vianney’s hometown. They even printed holy cards bearing Saint John’s picture, the spiritual equivalent of baseball trading cards. “I’ll give you one 1430 Joan of Arc for three 1858 Saint Johns, an 1820 Mother Seaton, and I’ll throw in a Holy Prepuce to boot!”

Venerating relics earns you indulgences, which, in simplified terms, are like getting time off for good behavior. Each indulgence reduces your stay in purgatory and hastens the journey to heaven. As an accomplished porn writer with a body more like a carport than a temple of the Holy Ghost, I set aside my skepticism. A little sacred time with the heart of a power confessor could do me no harm.

Spiritual Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)

I make my living chasing after people who cook the financial books, but we all know that the most deceitful accounting takes place in our moral ledgers. We debit ourselves a few points for sins and credit ourselves for good deeds. Saintly intercessions and indulgences boost the bottom line — graces, too. From time to time, we petition that certain sins count against those who led us astray,, and we seek to transfer credit for others’ good works to our own account, During most quarterly periods, I operated in the spiritual red, taking a huge advance against my moral allowance and suffering the most usurious terms of repayment.

Like a Wal-Mart with limited supplies of the latest Xbox offering during Christmas season, the cathedral was mobbed. The line of penitents reached from the altar to the doors. And the crowd didn’t — or didn’t exclusively — consist of kooks or religious wingnuts, either. They appeared to be normal folk of immoderate faith. There were more old people than young, but ages ranged from single to triple digits, and at least two twenty-somethings, wearing designer jeans and untucked oversize striped shirts, would have been at home at Google headquarters or a Coldplay concert.

In the narthex, the cathedral’s foyer, a stern blue nun handed me a flyer that informed me that Saint John’s body had been exhumed after he was beatified. This practice, a canon law tradition, allowed for identification of the body as well as documentation of a potential miracle — in particular, whether the potential saint’s flesh had decomposed. The Church viewed bodily incorruptibility as a sign of moral incorruptibility. Thus, a preserved body supported sainthood.

Despite the passage of years, Saint John’s body had been entirely free of decomposition. The French therefore decided to cut the saint’s heart out of his chest.

Wait.
What? Why on earth would they do that?

The blue nun’s flyer did not elaborate, but the absence of explanation or justification suggested this act should be attributed to Gallic whimsy.
Those crazy Gauls!

Personally, I pictured three or four dignified Frenchmen in berets gathered around a fresh hole in the ground. The saint’s coffin sits off to the side, its lid tilted at a precarious angle. The Frenchmen stare down at the saint’s corpse. The gravedigger leans on the handle to his shovel. As a group, they cross themselves and eat some Brie, The gravedigger smokes a Gauloise Blonde.

“Eh, Jacques, regarde!”
says the gravedigger. I’ll est bien preservé, n'est-ce pas?” (Hey, Jack, check out how well preserved he is.)

“Mais oui”
Jacques says.
“Quest-ce quon va faire?”
(What should we do?)

“Dit le curé”
(Tell the priest.)

“Merde! Que le curé aille se faire foutre!”
(Screw the priest!)

“Oh la la! Alors, faisons une autre pause de Brie et Gauloise”
(Well, we might as well take another Brie-and-Gauloise break.)

“Bonne idee!”
(Good idea!)

The Frenchmen break out a jug of wine and a baguette and insult each others’ mothers for a while. When they finish, the gravedigger jumps up and inspects the corpse.

“Quel dommage! Il parait que quelqu'un a deja volé le prepuce
.” (Too bad. Looks like someone already got the foreskin.)

The Frenchmen confer and drink more wine. After they finish another jug, the gravedigger again stumbles to his feet.

Brandishing the Brie knife, he shouts,
“Je sais ce quil faut faire
—
ä la place du prepuce, découpons son coeur!”
(I know what to do! Instead of the foreskin, let’s cut out his heart!)

OK, maybe not, but you come up with a more plausible explanation.

From that day of Brie and Gauloise forward, the heart and body were preserved in separate receptacles in the saint’s hometown. The body stayed put, but the saint’s extracted heart gallivanted to Rome for canonization in 1925 and was touring again eighty years later.

A case like an antique mantel clock housed the heart. The case sat at the foot of the chancel under a domed ceiling 120 feet high. Like a set of peacocks, five extremely French men surrounded the antique mantel clock. Each wore a plumed hat, white gloves, and a white sash, each with a different colored cape pinned neatly at his lower back. They exuded Gallic dignity.

The long, orderly line of pilgrims snaked down the center aisle. Four wooden prie-dieux (individualized kneelers or prayer benches) formed a semicircle around the reliquary. Father Hennessey directed traffic. When one worshipper rose from a prie-dieu, Father Hennessey directed the next in line to take his place.

Entire families approached en masse. Some of the kids knelt on the floor. A small boy refused to kneel because he was too short to see over the prie-dieu. Each worshipper handed a rosary, saint’s medallion, or one of the blue nun’s flyers to one of the white-gloved Frenchmen. Like a holy game of hot potato, that Frenchman handed the offering to the next Frenchman, who handed it to the next Frenchman, who laid it for thirty seconds on the reliquary — apparently long enough for the object to soak up a spiritual taint. Holy hot potato was repeated in reverse, from Frenchman to Frenchman to Frenchman to American devotee. Many of the pilgrims prayed during the process with closed eyes; others watched the progress of their offerings from Frenchman to Frenchman with an ill-concealed distrust of Gauls.

A basket for offerings sat in front of the relic. Devotees left both dollar bills and bits of paper with requests for intercession.

Asked to speculate as to what the pilgrims were asking for (aside from time off for good behavior), Father Hennessey said, “They’ll ask Saint John Vianney to intercede with God for the Archdiocese of Boston, that the Lord might send to us more men who are called to be ordained priests.”

Why do you need a relic to ask for that? Why not just pray and leave the heart in France, where it belongs?

“It’s tangible,” he said. “Relics are important in Catholic religious practice, not as talismans or good-luck charms, but as reminders of the saints’ holiness and as encouragement for others to emulate the saints behavior.”

“Think of Elvis Presley,” another priest suggested. “People get on eBay and they’ll try to get belongings or artifacts from Elvis … because having something of his makes you feel close. For Catholics, having a relic in our presence … inspires us because this relic is from the body of a person whose body and soul was for God.”

As it turns out, this priest hit the nail on the head: at any given moment, eBay auctions dozens of pieces of Jesus’ actual true cross. Many other relics would be available had the site not banned the sale of human remains.

“Seems like idol worship,” I suggested.

“It’s
veneration”
Hennessey clarified in an interview, “not worship. Worship is for God alone.”

“And Jesus and the Holy Spirit.”

“God in
all
His aspects,” Hennessey said.

The heart itself was brownish with a hint of pink in the middle. No evidence of gel or formaldehyde suggested chemical meddling. The holy absurdity made me want to participate in the spiritual burlesque.

I saw myself snatching the heart from its case, tucking it under my arm like a football, and sprinting down the center aisle. Dodging pilgrims and leaping pews, I sprinted out into the morning light, wildly squandering indulgences. The five Frenchmen chased me with drawn swords and capes flying, seeking to cut out my heart. We ran past the gay urban knickknack emporium where Mary sang her show tunes, past the gay gym where muscle boys spilled out onto the sidewalk to cheer, jeer, and pick up some fleet-footed priests with wandering eyes. We made a hard right turn at Twig, the flower shop, and ran down the Pride parade route, complete with Mardi Gras beads and go-go boys, past the home of the Gay Men’s Chorus and the Fenway Community Health Center’s AIDS hospice.