Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (26 page)

Waking from this vision of giddy irreverence, I wondered what the shuffling pilgrims were thinking. They seemed models of piety and goodness. Their faith was palpable and dense, their humility humbling.

Asked whether he regarded the saint’s well-preserved heart to be a miracle, Father Hennessey said, “Fd call it an extraordinary reality.”

Gram was going to have a hard time accepting the subtle theological shadings that separated veneration from worship, miracles from extraordinary realities, and divine foreskins from the secular variety.

Perhaps because the glory of Saint John’s heart had blinded me to his presence, I hadn’t noticed that Sean had his own smaller line of pilgrims on the opposite side of the sanctuary. He couldn’t compete with the day’s headliner.

Joining Sean’s line, I told myself I would be firm but kind. I wouldn’t lose my temper or my voice. Words wouldn’t fail me this time. I'd make elegant and compelling arguments leavened with humor and plainfolk wisdom. Fd confess my homosexuality. Fd point out that there are other vocations besides the priesthood and hetero marriage, other callings — including lectorhood.

“Whaddya gonna do, Sean?” I pictured myself saying. “Cut my heart out? You’re not even French!”

At these words of wisdom, Sean would fall down like Saul on the road to Tarsus. He’d repent and rededicate his remaining years to serving as chaplain to the
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
production set.

When I finally reached the archbishop, his handlers were tugging gently at his sleeves, reminding him of another appointment. He looked weary and stoic. Around his neck hung a reliquary in the shape of a cross.

“Whaddya got in there?” I asked to break the ice, instantly regretting the chatty tone.

“It’s a piece of cloth stained with the blood from the stigmata of Saint Padre Pio,” Cardinal Sean said. “I got it as a gift.”

“Cool.”
Cool? Oh, my God. What was I doing?

“Saint Pio was a Capuchin, too,” Cardinal Sean added, beaming as if he, too, might bleed from the feet and ankles someday.

One of the handlers interrupted. “Time to go,” he said. “Will you excuse us? Sorry.”

“Wait!” I said. I blurted out something confused and long-winded about how the Church’s interference in the politics of the gaymarriage fight was demeaning the Church and depleting its resources and gifts, etc.

The handlers drew His Excellency away, blinking rapidly. Had he heard me? A moment later, Elvis had left the building,

“It’s my Church, too!” I called after them, weakly repeating this claim to the old man behind me wearing a Red Sox jacket. The man scolded me as if I were one of his naughty children. Not only had I cock-blocked the archbishop, but I’d spoiled his whole spiritual day. He spouted hellfire and the usual panoply of sins, yet tacitly his scolding acknowledged that I still belonged to the great big Catholic family.

The following Tuesday, I returned to Saint Anthony Shrine.

“How’s the heart?” Mary Flanagan asked.

“Weird and wonderful,” I said.

She laughed softly, as if I’d confirmed her suspicions.

“What brings you here today?” Father Bear-Daddy asked. “It’s not Friday yet, is it?”

“I thought I’d volunteer for relic duty,” I said.

My discomfort with the brass pucks had evaporated. The show of faith — even blind faith — in St. John Vianney had moved me. The sacred heart was no holy prepuce, but a deep sense of transcendent tranquillity infused the devotions to it.

As the parishioners approached the Saint Anthony relic, their lips moved, citing the cares and worries for which they sought intercession, perhaps praying safe return of sailor sons and warrior daughters from the war in Iraq.

XII

The Empire Strikes Back

If only holiness were measured by the volume of our incessant chatter, we would be universally praised as the most holy nation on earth. But in our fretful, theatrical piety, we have come to mistake noisiness for holiness, and we have presumed to know, with a clarity and certitude that not even the angels dared claim, the divine will for the world. We have organized our needs with the confidence that God is on our side, now and always, whether we feed the poor or corral them into ghettos
.

— Charles Marsh,
Boston Globe Magazine
, July 8, 2007

Speaking of Relics

N
2005, I prosecuted a criminal securities fraud case against a local lawyer. Defense counsel, a small man with a Napoleonic ego, was an excellent lawyer. Frequently, he wounded our witnesses’ credibility on cross-examination. Each time he did, he adjusted his package.

It became routine. Every time he believed he had scored points for his client, all eyes went to his crotch. Sure enough, package adjustment followed. Eventually, the jury no longer listened to him. Instead, they just watched his crotch. Package adjustment? Score one for the defense. No package adjustment? A win for the prosecution. Adjusting his jock substituted for substance. (Ultimately his package failed to impress; the jury convicted his client.)

The same phenomenon played out on the political stage. Gay issues became Archbishop Sean’s big spiritual package adjustment. Whenever Sean was on the defensive — because of parish closings or pedophile priests, for example — he’d lobby politically against gays. The highlights:

• January 16, 2004: Mails a glossy four-page brochure to a million Massachusetts Catholics, urging them to help pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. (Number of glossy brochures sent to Catholics concerning the pedophile priest scandal = 0.)
  

• February 2004: Telephones at least one Catholic legislator who had not yet announced his position on same-sex marriage and urged that legislator to “vote with the Church.” O’Malley instructs other legislators that they have an obligation to cease receiving communion if they vote “against the Church.” (Contrast to his position in October 1994, when he opposed retail stores’ being open on Sundays, but told voters they needed to become informed and vote their consciences.)
  

• September 1, 2005: Writes to pastors of the archdiocese “to encourage parish cooperation in the campaign” for collecting signatures for a citizen petition for an amendment banning gay marriage. Permits pastors to collect signatures at parish masses “or to insert copies of the signature petition in your parish bulletin.”
  

• September 21, 2005: Sends letter to Massachusetts Catholics announcing the archdiocese’s support for a political organization devoted to collecting signatures to put an amendment banning gay marriage on the ballot. The letter explicitly encourages the collection of signatures after masses and at parish events.
  

• November 23, 2005: Issues a statement suggesting that Catholics have a duty to condemn the behavior of their homosexual brothers and sisters and that such condemnation constitutes an act of love: “If we tell people that sex outside of marriage is not a sin, we are deceiving people. If they believe this untruth, a life of virtue becomes all but impossible…. Calling [homosexual] people to embrace the cross of discipleship, to live the commandments, and at the same time assuring them that we love them as brothers and sisters can be difficult. Sometimes we are told: If you do not accept my behavior, you do not love me.’ In reality we must communicate the exact opposite: ‘Because we love you, we cannot accept your behavior/ “
  

Read that passage again: a life of virtue is “all but impossible” if you engage in sex outside of marriage. In other words, sexual sin trumps everything else. You could be Mother Teresa herself, but if you allowed another sister under your skirt, hellfire had you for eternity. The archbishop’s current vicar general, Richard Erickson, personally suggested that I should take comfort in this particular statement of Sean’s love.

• May 5, 2006: Prints letter to Massachusetts Catholics in the archdiocese’s newspaper urging them “as soon as possible” to contact their legislators with “personal visits, phone calls, and emails” to urge them to put an amendment banning gay marriage on the 2008 ballot.
  

• June 30, 2006: Issues statement attributing gay people’s desire for equal marriage rights to an “exaggerated sense of entitlement” motivated merely by “personal wants.”
  

• October 22, 2006: Issues statement in which we learn for the first time that the issue that concerns him is not same-sex marriage (what a relief!), “but whether the people have a say.”
  

• November 14, 2006: Ditto.
  

• December 21, 2006: Sends personal letters to every legislator, urging them to vote to put an amendment banning gay marriage on the 2008 ballot.
  

• December 29, 2006: Issues statement reiterating the content of the December 21 letter.
  

With great fanfare, Archbishop Sean signed a petition urging Congress to pass an amendment to the federal constitution banning gay civil marriage. Over and over, the Brown Bag, his lobbying arm, and VoteOnMarriage.org dishonestly repeated a smokescreen that was patently untrue but calculated to win votes: For thousands of years marriage has been the same, a union between one man and one woman.

Thousands of Years, My Ass: Á Short History of Matrimony

• The Old Testament describes marriages consisting of one man and many wives.
  

• Marriage became a sacrament in the twelfth century. That means it
  hasn’t
  been a’ sacrament longer than it
  has
  . been a sacrament,
  

• Until the nineteenth century, marriage constituted a contractual relationship concerning property. The husband had dominion over his wife and her property. Marriage assured the orderly uniting and passing on of family fortunes. It had nothing to do with personal relationships,
  

• As late as 1917, the Church described the role of marriage as procreation and a safe vessel for men’s nasty sexual urges. Only in 1930 did it first decide that the unity of spouses was also important.
  

• On October 29, 1951, Pope Pius XII (the only pope to invoke papal infallibility, to put forth the dogma of the assumption of Mary) suggested, for the first time ever, that married couples could engage in sex in ways that did not lead to conception provided they used no actual contraceptives.
  

Although he preached chastity, when it came to same-sex marriage, Sean proved promiscuous, even wanton. So long as you stood against it, he wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to join hands. He shared stages with right-wing nut jobs Mitt Romney, Concerned Women for America, and the Family Research Council, whose spokespeople said, among other things, that the “truth of homosexuality” meant a lifetime of AIDS, syphilis, and early death. Several of O’Malley’s early statements against same-sex marriage were also signed by the then-bishop of the Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts, who subsequently left his post in disgrace after being accused of molesting boys years earlier.

Although it had closed sixty parishes due to financial pressures, the archdiocese spent $911,000 on “community relations,” including gay marriage opposition, of which half a million went to its lobbying organization, the Massachusetts Catholic Conference (MCC).

Holy Mathematics

Ed Saunders, executive director of the MCC, told me he couldn’t provide even an approximation of how much went to opposing gay marriage, though he helpfully conceded that the MCC spent $400 for a spot on EWTN. I performed the following calculation based solely on the January 16, 2004 mailing:

1,000,000 brochures x $0.157 per piece nonprofit standard mail rate = $157,000.

That wasn’t so hard, was it, Ed?

The political mobilization was nearly unprecedented. The closest historical echo came from the 1940s, when the archdiocese registered voters, rented billboards, paid for radio advertising, and had priests urge a no vote from the pulpit against a measure liberalizing the state’s restrictive birth control law. (“Birth control is against God’s law; vote no on Proposition Two.”)

Sean’s single-minded focus on gay marriage made me feel unfairly singled out. Where was the speech advocating a law forcing non-Catholics to donate to the poor? Why was Sean not seeking a law banning birth control for everybody or making birth control users ineligible for civil marriage? Why wasn’t the Church going after civil divorce, clearly at odds with sacramental marriage, and far more of a threat to heterosexual marriages?