Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (29 page)

Scott said that he
was
happy, and normally not angry. But it was apparent both statements were lies. Correcting himself, he said, “It’s not godlessness that makes me unhappy. It’s the way you people who say you believe in God act and talk.”

That Flushing Sound is Charity Going Straight Down the Drain

Scott and I learned by accident that my brother and sister-in-law — Mikaela’s parents — had voted for George Bush in the 2004 election. The announcement came at a dinner party months after the fact. With a Cheshire cat smile, my brother said: “This is a Bush household.”

My jaw dropped open, and he repeated: “This is a Bush household.”

His wife sidled up behind him and slipped her arm over her shoulders. They preened.

My brain whirled. I bit my lip so hard it bled. It was all I could do not to stomp out.

His wife pressed the issue. She wanted to complain about John Kerry’s flip-flopping, the Democrats’ lack of ideas, and a hundred other complaints.

“We need to stop talking about this,” I muttered. It was inconceivable that — in front of my boyfriend — they could express support for a man as antigay as George Bush, a man who expressed support for a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

“But— “

“We need to stop talking about this
now."

My anger exploded in the safety of our car an hour later. I railed against my brother and his wife. I called my sister and railed to her. When I got home, I let loose with my poison-letter-writing habit. It was two in the morning. There was no light in the room except from the screen of my laptop.

Dear Bruce
(I wrote):

Fuck you
.

I stared at the phrase for a few minutes. I had trouble coming up with anything more. The phrase seemed so perfectly to capture my feelings, as if the words had been invented solely for my use on this very day, and all other uses prior and into the future were purely accidental and necessarily inapt.

Nevertheless, I continued:

I could not go another minute letting you get away with staying inside your tiny, claustrophobic breeder’s cocoon. You have fucked me, you Judas
.

I stared at the words. They seemed of reasonable biblical wrath, and I continued on in much the same vein for about ten single-spaced pages ending with a promise:
I'll remember this. I'll remember it forever
.

Out of habit (and out of truth), I started to type “1-o-v-e” as the closing before my signature. Then I stopped. Shaking with rage and indecision, I stared at the finished page. Send it? Don’t send it? Drive back to Bruce’s house and murder him in his sleep?

I tore the pages from the printer and thrust them in Scott’s face. Sitting on the pew, he read the letter and remained silent for a long while.

“Well?” I demanded.

“Don’t be a hypocrite,” he said.

“What? Are you taking their side? Who’d
you
vote for?”

“How do you think I feel about your participation in the Catholic Church? You even give money to them! This is no different.”

I reminded him about the good works the Shrine does. For the hundredth time, I touted the Shrine’s autonomy and the fact that the proceeds of its collected baskets never reached the archdiocese.

He shook his head. “Don’t you think your brother can find excuses for Bush, too? He’ll say he voted for Bush despite the antigay thing, not because of it. Just like you say about the Catholic Church.”

“That’s not the same thing at all,” I fumed, full of irrational resentment. We argued all night, a reprise of the fight Scott had had with Rory and Jezebel. At dawn, exhausted by the battle, we stared at one another, each of us wondering how he could possibly have less in common with the other, and what capricious bastard first came up with the idea to thrust us together for His own amusement.

XIII

The Super Colon and the Scandal Of Faith

Loyalty and obedience are good values, but obedience to my parents when I was three and they told me don't ever cross the street without holding Mummy’s hand, there’s a reason behind that. And the reason is not just “because I said.” But if I’m thirty years old and I still have to wait for Mum and Dad to hold my hand to cross the street, perhaps I haven’t understood the meaning behind the message
.

— Father Richard Lewandowski, Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts

The Success of Snitchers

UIBBLING ABOUT WHETHER
to put one or two scoops of wheat in the holy bread batter doesn’t constitute most people’s idea of a good time. So it might have been easy to dismiss snitches like Bill the Breviary as just more Catholic kookery —
Oh, those wacky snitches, dont mind them
— except that their penchant for stealth and deception over face-to-face dialogue mirrored the Catholic bishops’ standard operating procedure.

Consider Father Walter Cuenin’s story. Testifying before the Massachusetts legislature, Cuenin questioned the propriety of a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.
The New Yorker
quoted him saying that the front rows of Catholic churches should be reserved for divorced people and gays. He received an award at a gay pride ceremony from the Pride Interfaith Coalition for his work for justice. At his suburban parish, he regularly acknowledged his gay parishioners from the pulpit, referenced pride in his bulletin, and baptized the children of gay couples. He also signed a letter calling for the removal of Archbishop O’Malley’s predecessor, the panderer Cardinal Law.

Cuenin’s activities made him a favorite target of the snitches, who smugly claimed to be sending letters to Rome asking, “How could you allow this man to be a pastor?”

In fact, Cuenin never preached against Church teachings. Instead, he raised questions, and one of his homilies might go something like this:

The archdiocese is asking Catholics to vote for the amendment banning same-sex marriage, so you should pay attention to the archbishop’s letter. At the same time, people are finding that gay couples’ adopting children seems to be a good thing. Take a couple of gay guys who adopt children from Romania. You don’t have to favor same-sex marriage to think those children are better off with a pair of gay parents than in a Romanian orphanage.

But when O’Malley took over from Law, the situation soured. On July 8, 2005, Bishop Lennon, the vicar general of the archdiocese, wrote a letter to various snitches reporting that Archbishop O’Malley was “very disturbed” by reports that Cuenin had encouraged parishioners to participate in gay pride: “Please know that the archbishop is very disturbed by the information that you, along with others, have sent to him regarding this event and the involvement of Father Cuenin. He wishes to assure you that he is in the process of addressing this whole matter.”

“Addressing” soon followed, O’Malley summoned Cuenin to the chancery and asked him to resign from his post. Rather than cite his homilies or legislative testimony — or give no explanation at all — Sean helpfully suggested a few excuses Cuenin could offer his parish, none of which had the benefit of being true.

Cuenin refused the invitation to lie. Shortly afterward, the archdiocese hired a forensic auditor to review the books of Cuenin’s parish. The auditor soon “discovered” what the parish’s normal auditor had blessed for years: the parish paid for a leased car for Cuenin’s use. The parish finance board had approved the lease, but the archdiocese now disallowed the arrangement. For this manufactured impropriety, the archdiocese removed Cuenin from his church in late September 2005.

The Church addressed the “problem” of womenpriests using the same backroom approach. In 2007, the womenpriests persuaded a pastor at Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York City to rent his church to them for an ordination. Shortly before the scheduled ordination, a Roman Catholic nun named Sarah Butler got wind of it. Sister Sarah had once written a paper in favor of women’s ordination, but she traded teams in the off-season and became a Sambo-style apologist for the Church’s refusal to open the conversation to the possibility of ordained women. B16 regularly points to Sister Sarah, tells her to dance, and says,
See, even women don’t want to be ordained!

Sister Sarah visited RomanCatholicWomenpriests.org and saw the announcement of the New York ordination, checking it against the online calendar at Saint Peter’s. Instead of calling the pastor directly and expressing her dismay, Sister Sarah e-mailed the nearest Roman Catholic priest, claiming the ordination would “do very serious damage to the relationship between the Catholic and Lutheran (ELCA) churches.” As a result of Sister Sarah’s sleuthing, two weeks before the ordination, the presiding Lutheran bishop told the pastor at Saint Peter’s that he was risking an “international incident” that might have ramifications for Catholic-Lutheran relations. The pastor promptly canceled the contract and disinvited the womenpriests. It was the first time since the Reformation that a Lutheran bishop has taken direction from the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

Within days of averting this potential international incident, B16 reasserted the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church. He approved a document that expressed the view that other Christian communities were either defective or not true churches and that Catholicism provides the only true path to salvation. So much for the spirit of comity and ecumenism that Sister Sarah was worrying about!

My own low-octane brush with the Church’s underbelly occurred when I called Father Kick-Me to determine the archdiocese’s opinion on gay godparenting. On learning that I was writing this book, he closed our conversation with an oblique but unambiguous shot across my bow. He recounted the story of George Spagnola, a diocesan priest. According to Kick-Me, Spagnola had launched a public protest against a parish closing. Prior to the protest, Spagnola’s former male partner (Spag, as he liked to be called, had taken a short vacation from his vow of celibacy) warned that the publicity would likely expose their relationship. Spag foolhardily persisted. He cheerled a protest that garnered extensive media coverage. Three days later, Spag’s relationship came to light. He lied that it had been his only relationship — only to be exposed again. Ultimately Spag faced accusations of molesting a child. “The number of people at the second protest was down to about ten,” Kick-Me said smugly* “And they were very sullen-looking.”

Kick-Me’s invocation of Spag’s story implied that I, too, should watch my gay ass. Did I really want to make a public spectacle when I had so much to hide? I decided my best course was to launch a preemptive strike. You heard it here first. I:

• murdered a gerbil,
  

• insisted on my own personal Christmas tree and expected a second set of gifts to surround it,
  

• threatened the sanctity of marriage,
  

• failed to recycle my public speeches,
  

• fried bugs under a magnifying glass in the sun,
  

• coveted throat lozenges,
  

• derefrigerated strawberries,
  

• built more tunnels than bridges,
  

• self-Googled,
  

• YouTubed,
  

• served as Satan’s handmaiden,
  

• wrote dirty stories,
  

• indulged in non-FDA-approved pharmaceuticals,
  

• experienced a little sexual tension in conversation with Father Bear-Daddy, and
  

• held Mama Bear’s process-oriented comments against him.
  

Not having taken any in the first place, I didn’t stray from any vows of chastity.

Less Holy

The more the Church defaulted to veiled threats or underhanded action, the more the defensible Church shrunk in my hands, and its spirit slipped out between my fingers. Instead of putting honesty first, the Church offered the pretextual firing of Cuenin, retribution against him and the fifty-seven other signers of the letter demanding Law’s resignation, and MCC’s dumb show that it couldn’t even begin to estimate how much it spent opposing gay marriage.

Why the bullshit? Why the unerring instinct for the untrue? If I couldn’t trust the Church on such simple matters, why in God’s name would I trust it with my salvation?

My outlook grew less holy. I feverishly collected articles about gay couples oppressed by the Church and contacted them to learn their stories. I subscribed to antigay Catholic blogs and engaged in senseless online warfare, I ran into a group of friars shopping in Downtown Crossing, Boston’s low-rent shopping district. With plastic sacks curled round their wrists containing their meager loot, they looked shabby and unbecoming, like the cast-out remnants of a once-powerful family.