Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (38 page)

When the archdiocese asked parish priests to participate in the collection of signatures in favor of an amendment banning same-sex marriage, however, Father Butterballino was torn. For two of the three weekends Cardinal Sean requested petitions be made available in the back of the church, Father Butterballino procrastinated. Some parishioners took him to task; they wanted him to comply with the cardinal’s request. Snitches raced back to the chancery with lists of nonconforming pastors, including Butterballino.

On the third weekend, he gave in and made the petitions available. He told his gay parishioners that he felt like he had no choice. “I told them Tm between a rock and a hard place. You know where I stand on these things. But he’s your archbishop, and I am his local representative, and he asked me to provide you with an opportunity to do certain things. I find it difficult not to do that.’“

Among Butterballino’s parishioners was a lesbian couple. Cradle Catholics, both named after saints, they were raising their two children as Catholics complete with parochial-school education. Let’s call them Joan (of Arc) and Clare (of Assisi). Joan and Clare had belonged to the parish for nine years and were close personal friends of Father Butterballino.

Asked how they reacted, Father Butterballino was blunt. “They left the Church. I didn’t blame them. If I were another age, I might make different decisions, too.” A gray cloud of exhaustion passed over his face. “Joan an Clare said to me, 'For the first time we felt unsafe in our church.' And I’ve got to take responsibility for that. That’s a great sadness for me. That I did something that made them feel that way.”

Joan and Clare fled to a United Church of Christ congregation just a few blocks away and became religious crossovers.

“I felt totally betrayed,” Clare told me. “I still feel betrayed about it…. I thought we were going to be OK, that we were going to make it through [the same-sex marriage debate] … which was very difficult, but I trusted that [Father Butterballino] wouldn’t give any kind of sermon or preach about this…. I felt like I was sucker-punched … and I still don’t understand why he felt he had to do this…. It was hard for me. It’s still hard for me. I would love to go back to [Father Butterballino’s] church. I felt like I had come home.”

Joan and Clare’s outrage and Father Butterballino’s remorse seemed well-deserved. It was hard to find a rational basis to support his sense of compulsion. The archdiocese couched none of its communications to its pastors as demands. Reverend Kick-Me informed me the chancery never followed up on the snitches who reported non-conforming parishes. Indeed, many other diocesan priests openly announced that they wouldn’t make the petitions available. Fr. Jack Ahern of St. Mary of the Assumption Church in Brookline, Massachusetts, wrote in his parish bulletin, “As is my custom, there is no signing of petitions for any initiative in the Church. Catholics differ on these matters, and we need to respect the rights of all.” When a signature collector appeared at the Shrine, Father Bear-Daddy ordered security guards to escort her to the street.

Had Joan and Clare forgiven Butterballino for driving them from the Church?

“Forgive is probably the wrong word…. I don’t know that I have something to forgive him for…. He’s walking a tightrope in that church, he really is,” Joan said. “[Father Butterballino] is very dynamic, a great pastor…. [He] was very good about the baptism [of one of their children] and [the children] both did First Communion…. [Father Butterballino] didn’t treat us any differently from any of the other families.”

In fact, Father Butterballino supported Joan and Clare’s civil marriage and the civil marriages of other gay parishioners. He admitted, “I’ve been to four civil weddings of gay people. It scares the shit out of me because those are very public situations. After the rite is over, whatever it is, I do some kind of prayer or blessing. If I’m called on it, I can say I was there and I performed a prayer. I didn’t perform a wedding.”

I asked Father Butterballino, “Why do it at all, if you’re going to do it in this rinky-dink, sneaky way?” (phrased more diplomatically, of course).

“I think the Church needs to be there for two reasons,” he said. “First these are Catholic people who are getting married where they are getting married because the Church won’t recognize them. Second, so many times when the Church is talking about something, they just don’t know.”

Since the incident with the petitions, Father Butterballino reported some progress, which I couldn’t help but attribute to his remorse. He came out to a member of his parish staff who had learned her son was gay. He had triumphant comings-out to select acquaintances. He even learned to be open with his parishioners that he was spending his summer vacation in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the gay beach mecca.

Sometime after Joan and Clare’s wedding, one of his parishioners approached Father Butterballino and said, “You won’t believe what I heard, Father.”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard from somebody that lives in [the next town over] that ‘those women’ held some kind of wedding or something, and that you went to it.”

“Is that what you heard?” Father Butterballino asked.

“Yes, Father.”

“Hmmm,” he said. “Isn’t
that something?”

My first instinct was to belittle these half-steps and his refusal to come out and come clean —- but I tried to put myself in his shoes. After all, Father Butterballino’s reticence was recognizable: it had been no different for most of us — circling the block seventeen times before we worked up the nerve to enter a gay bar, confiding in just a few people before telling the world more widely, crossing over one last time before embracing our gayness.

The half-steps he took really mattered. For Joan and Clare, the imprimatur of Father Butterballino’s blessing helped reassure their children, for whom the idea of a marriage brought the unwelcome and unforeseen specter of divorce. For another gay couple, the public blessing at their wedding was as moving as the exchange of vows. They were gay men, so tears flowed freely when Father Butterballino laid his ample hands on their shoulders.

Two steps forward, one back. Father Butterballino daintily hefted his girth along the Catholic tightrope, maintaining a tenuous grip on his spiritual waffle.

Gay Voices

Scott and I were enjoying brunch one Sunday morning in the gayborhood with a friend. Our friend described an abortive attempt he had made the night before to engage a young man, whose acquaintance he had just met, in the sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance.

“You should consider yourself lucky,” Scott quipped after hearing the whole ugly saga. “/ had to go home and sleep with my boyfriend.”

A woman at the next table gasped. She had just experienced an authentic gay moment. Now she could rush home and tell all the other mothers in her book group. “It was just like
Queer as Folk”
she would gush. “They actually talk out loud about blow jobs! Over brunch!”

In reality, the moment possessed as much authenticity as breaking a wineglass and concluding you had just participated in a Jewish wedding. But it raised an interesting question.
Was
there an authentic and peculiarly gay blessing that my tribe brought to the spiritual community? A number of priests, Dignity elders, random folks, and even the Courage chaplain offered me their views:

• “We are fun-loving and campy and inject a lot of humor into hard situations.” — former lay ministry committee member
  

• “We’ve been kicked around, and we bring that. I’m not sure I can say what that does for us. I guess that a lot of people who came to Jesus were those that had been kicked around,” — Joan
  

• “Redemption. Gay people can take sustenance from the hand of the one that oppresses them.” — former Jesuit priest
  

• “Think about how many hymns [were] written by gay people, stained glass designed by gay people, architecture.“ — former lay ministry committee member
  

• “Gay people’s exuberance, their over-the-top, heart-on-sleeve, bigger-than-life feelings that are taken for granted in some cultures, but considered threatening in this cold, repressed Irish culture. In Malta, there’s an arms race of village against village, parish against parish, as to who is going to have the grandest fireworks display. Some parishes actually own fireworks manufacturers. They begin planning for next year’s feast the day after the feast day. Nothing like that in our culture.” — Picasso (of the G-L Spirituality Group)
  

• “I tend to find the [gay] guys have beautiful, sensitive hearts. That can be dark, in that because they are sensitive, they get hurt easily. But it can be light — such compassion for suffering in others and a desire to alleviate suffering in others.” — Father John, Courage chaplain
  

• “GLBT folks understand the holiness and sacredness of sexuality…. It is an important part of what it is to be Christian…. GLBT folks understand the place of body in prayer and commitment.” — lesbian womanpriest
  

• “GLBT persons have had to learn to embrace, cherish, and celebrate the human body. From my Dignity experience, I see how GLBT Catholics bring their bodies with them to worship: singing, moving, clapping, embracing, laughing…. GLBT Catholics understand and live the incarnation mystery.” — Dignity priest
  

• “The Sistine Chapel would be painted some horrible shade of beige if it weren’t for us.” — G-L Spirituality Group member
  

• “All gays and lesbians I know have suffered, and so I think they bring a spiritual dimension that is maybe a little bit different from the suffering of their straight counterparts. A greater sensitivity to issues of injustice. A desire for a greater justice in society and the world.” — diocesan priest
  

• “Gay people are an evolved, biologically advanced Dar-winistic adaptation to overpopulation, like what happens to rats on ships. You can see it at the Museum of Science. Their sex drive shuts down. Our sex drives morph in a way that achieves the same end…. We’re not cavemen anymore, and the concept of love has become more advanced than mere reproduction. Thus we are on a higher plane than animals who are out there grunting and trying to reproduce. Straight people want this, but they are out there shitting out babies. We’re not in survival mode. We’re not just breeding and putting food in our mouths. We’re asking how can we make life better, not just pure survival.” — Scott Whittier
  

My answer: inventiveness. By physical necessity, we’ve got to make up ways to get off since we do not use hetero tab A and slot B in the same way. (Rory and Jezebel’s premarital sexual inventiveness almost made them honorary fags.) We’ve had to be inventive to survive persecution in a heterosexist world. Our love for and tweaking of liturgy reflects our ritual inventiveness, in which I see an aspect of God, because He, too, is an inventor. As Cardinal Sean says (over and over), “The Eucharist is God’s invention.”

But a nagging doubt played at me: that I wanted to be two things at once. I wanted to be both exceptional, blessed with certain charisms by virtue of being gay, and at the same time ordinary, in that I deserved civil marriage just like my straight brothers and sisters. I wanted to be a rebel within.

On account of this doubt, the most comforting answer came from a gay man at the Shrine who is civilly married to his nonbelieving husband, who told me he didn’t think there was such a thing as a peculiarly gay spirituality. But he said, “I wouldn’t be in the Catholic Church without [my husband]. To be loved unconditionally is to know what it means to understand who God is. And I don’t think I would understand the idea of God at all if it weren’t for my relationship with [my husband].”

“Does your husband know that?” I asked,

“If I told him, I think he’d be freaked out. He’s a real model for me of what unconditional love is…. Because of him I get God in a way I never got through twelve years of Catholic school.”

Back in the Saddle

Father Abraham lay prostrate on the marble. Long seconds passed. Chewbacca grunted. Aged friars, mostly retirees, kneeled in spare pews, all of which were full. The Shrine was bursting at the seams. The Passion’s narrator flubbed all the proper names and betrayed a working-class accent she hid in everyday speech.

I had gone to the gym just before Mass and forgotten to bring a clean pair of underwear, so I was going commando beneath my tailored suit. When my turn at the ambo came, I felt a little sassy. Words rolled off the tongue. I said a little prayer to myself that went something like this: I
don’t know what I want from You, God, if I want anything at all I don’t want to beseech You, or thank You, or seek Your forgiveness or others salvation. I just want to stand naked before You, choked with wonder, uttering a prayer as joyful, guttural, sorrowful, agonizing, and inarticulate as an orgasm
.

We were in my favorite liturgical cycle, focusing on the Gospel of Luke, with all its outsider stories that appear nowhere else: the good Samaritan, Martha and Mary, the prodigal son, the rich man and Lazarus, the corrupt judge and the widow, the Pharisee and the tax collector, the woman at the well. All these stories emphasized ministry to the marginalized and outcast.

My mother arrived while I was reading. Her face showed traces of age, but her eyes hadn’t aged a day. She looked beautiful, like the woman who arrived from Dublin at Idle wild Airport in 1964 wearing pointy Jackie Kennedy shoes.

In his homily, Father Abraham reminded us that we know the Passion story not only because it is read every Good Friday, but because we know the cross from living our own lives. His words made me think about Mama Bear, Job, Picasso, Alphaba, and all the other heroes of the G-L Spirituality Group. There are no accidental or knee-jerk Catholics among gay people. Martina did not casually drift into her devotion. Every day, every pronouncement, Abacus re-tallies the beads of his belief, the credits, debits, and bottom line. Gay people continuously ask why, and we have to keep coming up with reasonably good answers.