Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (35 page)

Bail, Holy Queen

On the feast days of Catholic saints, interminable processions parade through the narrow streets of the North End, Boston’s Italian neighborhood. The Italian faithful hoist Our Lady of Leche to their shoulders so the Irish faithful can say oh-la-la at her exposed breast. (The Boston Irish get truly incensed about uncovered breasts.) These parades proceed so slowly that they seem to take one step back for every two steps forward.

The archdiocese adopted the same rhythm in its treatment of gay Catholics. In 1977, for example, it expelled Dignity from Saint Clement’s Church. In 1979, the archdiocese declared that its priests were no longer authorized to serve at Dignity services. In the 1980s, the archdiocese made a point of refusing to take Dignity’s money. Dignity took a collection and sent the proceeds to the archdiocese. Every year, the check came back. It became a game to see how large a donation it would take before the Church allowed itself to be bought.

The AIDS crisis marked a temporary cessation of hostilities. Ignorance about the disease made many people, including priests, frightened to engage those dying of the disease. Churches refused to have funerals for the afflicted. Priests refused to administer sacraments. Even at Dignity, questions arose. What was safe and what was unsafe? Could HIV-positive men drink from the chalice? If a man was sweating, what would you do at the sign of peace? Could you kiss him? Touch him ?

One old-school Dignity member said to me, “When one of my friends came to me and told me he had been diagnosed, I fell into his arms sobbing, saying, ‘You can’t die. I don’t care what you have. I want to hold you.’ But if he had not been one of my friends? Well, I probably would have kept him at arm’s length. We just didn’t know.”

The ignorance had a spiritual cost. One priest who had never before had much contact with gay people described his first encounter with a dying AIDS patient this way:

It was 1983. I was in the hospital anointing someone who was dying, and they called me to anoint someone dying of AIDS. I was dressed in my collar. The patient saw me and said, “Get out of here. I hate priests!”

“Why?”

“I’m gay. My priest told me I’m going to hell and a no good piece of garbage. I asked another priest to anoint me. He stood in the doorway and said, Til give you a blessing from here.’”

“That must have been painful. I’m sorry.” I said. We talked for a while and then I asked, “Do you want me to anoint you?”

He said yes.

When I got close, I saw his head was sweating. I had heard that you could get AIDS through bodily fluids. I thought to myself,
If I touch his sweat, I could get AIDS
. But I didn’t want to be like that other priest. So I took a deep breath.

OK, God
, I said,
it’s important to do this. If I get it, I get it
.

I didn’t heal that patient. But he sure healed me.

Even Cardinal Law responded to the crisis, albeit in the Church’s typically underhanded, secretive way: “[He] did a lot of work with people with AIDS,” Duddy told me. “Quietly, of course, going late at night, but really listening to people, spending a lot of time. People found him really comforting and very much with them.”

In addition to Dignity, another familiar gay Catholic name served as a bright spot in dim times. As the AIDS crisis took hold, the Jesuit Urban Center at the Church of the Immaculate Conception reached out to its urban neighbors, who, during the 1970s, had become predominantly gay. For the next twenty five years, the JUC hosted Tuesday dinners to give people suffering from AIDS a chance for fellowship and conversation as well as a meal. The JUC buried scores of gay men, including those whose families and home parishes had abandoned them. Parishioners participated in the AIDS walk and later marched with a JUC banner in Boston’s gay pride parade.

A series of Jesuits led the JUC community. Homilies often began with jokes about skimpy Pride costumes. Many JUC members fondly recalled a particular Marian devotion in which the gay Jesuit presider processed during the opening hymn from the back of the church to the altar. When he reached the microphone and the music stopped, he joked, “I always feel a little nervous when I walk down the aisle and they are playing ‘Hail, Holy Queen.’“

Brokeback Lent

Already known for homilies that touched on gay topics, one Jesuit homilist managed to work
Brokeback Mountain
into his pre-Lent sermon:

I suspect many in. this community have already seen
Brokeback Mountain
. If not, see it; if you have, see it again,, and let this Lent be a Brokeback Lent. Let yourself feel genuinely dreadful at just how little you accept God’s invitation to be yourself, to be honest, to live more freely, to love more passionately, even to be prepared to die for those whom you love.

Within hours of the Brokeback Lent homily, the presider received over a thousand messages, from all over the world, including death threats, with copies to Cardinal O’Malley, the Jesuit provincial leader, and J2P2.

Weeks later, the presider introduced himself to the cardinal’s secretary, Reverend Kick-Me, whom he had never before met,

“Oh, you’re the
Brokeback
priest!”‘ Reverend Kick-Me exclaimed,

“And you’re the poor. schmuck who had to read all the e-mails,” replied the presider.

Milk and Cookies

On October 30, 1986, the Rat issued the “Halloween Letter,” a statement urging all Catholic bishops to oppose every legislative effort, at every level of government, that could be construed as providing equal rights under the law for gays. The targets of this initiative included not just opposition to gay marriage, civil unions, and domestic partnership benefits, but also ordinances targeting discrimination against people in the workplace on account of sexual orientation. As a result of the letter, all Dignity chapters across the United States that had not yet been expelled from Church property were given their walking papers.

Despite his earlier work with AIDS victims, Cardinal Law vigorously enforced the Rat’s mandate. According to Marianne Duddy, Law “had a powerful lobbying arm. It really delayed our getting civil rights. He threatened legislators [and] did a lot of damage to public-health funding and youth education around HIV transmission. He even worked to oppose allocating money for youth suicide prevention,”

In 1998, Dignity members sought a meeting with Law. They gathered at the chancery. “It started off strange,” Duddy recalled. “He had the nuns bring us milk and cookies. It was like an after-school special — so weird, and such a hierarchical, traditional nun-bishop kind of thing. Then he started lecturing us, doing the whole party-line thing.

“Someone in our group said, ‘We came to talk with you, not to have you talk at us. How about if we each tell you a little bit about us, what our lives are like and then we can talk?’ It cut him off. We talked about who we were, what we were doing with our lives, how long we had been involved with Dignity, how we grew up Catholic. He was getting it. He was very empathic.”

Shortly afterward, Law wrote an editorial in the archdiocesan newspaper condemning antigay violence. He addressed ministry to AIDS patients in the bulletin at the cathedral. But the papal nuncio promptly showed up at the chancery and told Law to get back in line.

Being a bishop means never having to say you re sorry
, I imagined him saying.
Now, where s that damn nun with my milk and cookies?!

Need a Catholic Priest? Ask the Lesbian Few

As if passing a tarted-up Our Lady of Leche from one set of shoulders to another, other gay Catholic heroes stepped in to take up where Dignity left off. It was early 2002. Vermont’s civil unions had taken effect, and the conservative crowd in Massachusetts (all six of them) in concert with the snitches launched the first campaign to amend the Massachusetts Constitution to prohibit gay marriage.

Holly Gunner, a New York—born lesbian Jew, asked herself. What’s the competition got that I don’t? The answer: the Catholic Church and a claim that kids are better off with straight parents.

Gunner assembled world-class pediatricians to address the latter issue. The former proved more problematic.

“I knew nothing about the way the Church worked,” she admitted, “but I knew the legislature was around 70 percent Catholic. A bunch of Quakers and a few rabbis wouldn’t do.”

Gunner heard about three potentially helpful priests and set to work persuading them to join the cause. Fathers Walter Cuenin, Tom Carroll (director of the JUC), and Rich Lewandowski (a pastor in the Diocese of Worcester) all agreed to testify before the Massachusetts legislature against the proposed amendment. Their carefully crafted testimony didn’t contradict Church teaching on sexual morality, but instead questioned the proposed amendment’s justice and fairness. Lewandowski’s approach was typical:

I believe it to be imperative that both the Church and the state do all in their power and join forces whenever possible to assist couples in strengthening the bonds of marriage…. House Bill 4840, while promoted as a “defense of marriage” constitutional amendment, does nothing to protect or help marriage, … It fails to address the divorce factor…. In fact, this amendment infers [sic] that multiple marriages and countless unions are just fine as long as these bonds are of “only one man and one woman” at a single time. Also, by stating that “any other relationship shall not be recognized as marriage or its legal equivalent, nor shall it receive the benefits and incidents exclusive to marriage,” it excludes same-gender relationships and family units from affirmation and societal support. This does nothing to protect family life. It only weakens it. My fear is that House Bill 4840, rather than honestly supporting marriage and family life, might be used to encourage unjust discrimination against gay men and lesbian women and their committed relationships and the children in those relationships.

The three priests caught the Catholic Church flatfooted. Weakened by the scandal, the Massachusetts Catholic Conference did not produce a single witness to testify in favor of the bill. The next day, the headline in the
Boston Globe
read, “Three Priests Oppose Ban on Gay Marriage.” The proposed amendment died.

A new amendment came to a hearing in 2003. Cuenin was unavailable, and Gunner knew she couldn’t afford to go from three priests to two, so she sought the help of James Keenan, a prominent Jesuit theologian at Boston College. Making a distinction between “the Church’s theology of chastity as it applies to sexual relations between gay and lesbian persons and the Church’s theology of justice as it applies to all persons, regardless of sexual activity,” Keenan noted that “the Church does not by any extension endorse the unequal or discriminating treatment of those whose sexual practices she condemns.” He testified that there were therefore no Roman Catholic theological grounds for support of the amendment.

This time, the MCC had assembled its own trinity of witnesses to testify in support of the amendment: Gerry D’Avolio, Daniel Avila, and an older parish priest. Each claimed that Catholic teaching on sexuality required a vote for the amendment.

When the MCC finished testifying, a Catholic legislator named Chris Fallón rose and addressed the priest. “Father, I’m confused. I’m a good Catholic. I go to church every Sunday. I went to parochial schools my whole life. And you’re telling me that for me to be a good Catholic and follow Catholic teaching, I should vote for this amendment. But I just heard three priests tell me that to be a good Catholic and support the Church’s social justice teachings, I have to vote against the amendments. And one [sic] of the three priests is a Jesuit, and we all know Jesuits are smarter than anybody. Father, what am I to do?”

After the laughter, the proposed amendment again died.

How DM the Church Punish the Renegades?

Good question. You’re catching on to how the archdiocese operates, forgoing transparency in favor of secrecy. First, the priests each received loads of hate mail from the snitches, including fellow clerics. Lewandowski told me, “I received a number of letters, mostly unsigned, and e-mails. I was given access to some Web sites that were pretty nasty. One [priest]. from the Archdiocese of Boston called and left a message … something to the effect that I am one with Satan.”

Cardinal Law called Cuenin and told him he had misread the text of the amendment. Cuenin politely disagreed and offered to talk it over. Law broke seven appointments to do so. and then resigned in disgrace- because of his role in the scandal O’Malley ultimately forced Cuenin to leave his parish, though the chancery denied that Cuenin’s testimony was the problem.

The day after the testimony, the MCC issued a scathing attack on Keenan and Lewandowski that concluded, “The priests communicated their personal opinions to the committee under the false guise of authority to the detriment of the integrity of the public hearing process. In our opinion, the manner of participation
in
the hearing by-these priests on April 28 was a disservice both to the Catholic Church and’ to the Massachusetts legislature,” The MCC also faulted the priests for not asking the MCC’s permission to testify.
The Pilot
, official newspaper of the archdiocese,, published an article that called Keenan nasty names, ‘

None of the four priests holds the position he held at the time of the testimony. Ostensibly their removal had nothing to do with the notion that any of them was one- with Satan. In fact, no reason has ever been offered for. the removal of Lewandowski, Keenan,-or Carroll, Must be pure coincidence.

Luckily, fellow clerics came to the support of the four priests. One sunny Sunday afternoon, 300 priests marched on the chancery, chanting “Power to the priests!” They ceremoniously burned their scapulars and stoles on the chancery steps. They strung up an effigy of Bishop Lennon on the Boston Common, Jesuit scholars worldwide signed a nearly unanimous letter vindicating Keenan. Hunger strikes were announced. At over 60 percent of Massachusetts parishes, the pastor held a moment of silence in solidarity with the oppressed priests. Posters of Che Guevara appeared on the walls of the nunnery of the Poor Sisters of Saint Claire (and on the walls of the tunnel between the convent and rectory)* Masked men in clerical garb rolled Cardinal Sean’s black sedan (Massachusetts license 80) over in the street outside the State House and put a torch to it. Mobs ransacked the editorial offices of
The Pilot
. A half-dozen renegade seminarians serially mooned Cardinal Sean’s bedroom window at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.